"Priggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the Vicarage. He was rather disturbed by Jack's remarks; it put him, he thought, in an odious light. Was he really so priggish and Jesuitical? That was the one danger of the life of the Don which he hoped he had successfully avoided. He was all for liberty, he imagined. Was he really, after all, a mild schemer with an ethical outlook? Was he bent on managing and uplifting people? ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard Caramel's card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... where strength or weakness lies. Brandon began his military career as a prize cadet and after getting his commission he was quickly promoted from subaltern rank. His advancement, however, caused no jealousy, for Dick Brandon was liked. He was, perhaps, a trifle priggish about his work—cock-sure, his comrades called it—but about other matters he was naively ingenuous. Indeed, acquaintances who knew him only when he was off duty thought him something ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... recognise it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, and right-minded boy risks unpopularity by telling a master of some evil practice which is spreading in a school. He simply regards it as a desire to meddle, a priggish and pragmatical act, and even as a sneaking desire ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the lecturer, if he might venture to say so, seemed to him, a poor ignorant farmer of sixty years' standing, not only uncalled-for and priggish, but downright brutal. It was that the man with little capital ought to be driven out of farming, and the sooner he went to the wall the better. Now, how would all the grocers and other tradesmen whom he had ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... priggish wits of that day were capable of being bored by didactic poetry, and especially by such didactic poetry as resolved itself too easily into a string of maxims, not more poetical in substance than the immortal "'Tis a sin to steal a pin." The essay—published anonymously—did ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the passages quoted, a foretaste of the priggish extravagance of the Faithful Shepherdess. That there should have been found critics to combine just but wholly otiose condemnation of Cloe with reverential appreciation of the absurdities of Clorin and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... at them better than you can, because I know all the while that at the very bottom of his heart he's only my baby Peter after all. He's not—God bless him—he's not the dreary, cold-blooded, priggish boy he sometimes pretends to be. Don't remember him like that now, Timothy. Think of that morning in June—that glorious, sunny morning in June, when you knelt by the open window in my room and thanked God because you had a son. Think of ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... this point (when the debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer: the others keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel—it is most wonderfully conveyed—as clearly as if indicated by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in it all, for the jest is not aimed at the real Washington, but at the Washington portrayed in the Weems biography. The worthy "rector of Mount Vernon," as he called himself, meant no harm, and there is a good deal of truth, no doubt, in his book. But the blameless and priggish boy, and the equally faultless and uninteresting man, whom he originated, have become in the process of development a myth. So in its further development is the Washington of the humorist a myth. Both alike are utterly and crudely false. They resemble their ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... ideas which before this had just vaguely troubled my peace, clouds hanging in a bright sky. I had the sense that there were some duties which I ought to perform, efforts to be made, ends to fulfil; but they had seemed to me expressed in rather priggish phrases, words which oppressed me, and ruffled the surface of my easy joy. Now they loomed up before me as big realities which could not be escaped, hills to climb, with no pleasant path round about their bases. I seemed in sight of some inspiring secret. I could not ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a pettish conversation. I asked him whether he might not perhaps find the discipline he needed in doing the pastoral work which did not interest him, rather than in developing his life on lines which he preferred. I confess that it was rather a priggish line to take; and in any case it did not come well from me because as a schoolmaster I think I always pursued an individualistic line, and worked hard on my own private basis of preferences rather than on the established system of the school. But I did not understand Hugh at this date. It ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Who, pray, has accused me as yet? Here am I smothering dear good old Mrs. Grundy's objections, before she has opened her mouth. I love, I say, and scarcely ever tire of hearing, the artless prattle of those two dear old friends, the Perigourdin gentleman and the priggish little Clerk of King Charles's Council. Their egotism in nowise disgusts me. I hope I shall always like to hear men, in reason, talk about themselves. What subject does a man know better? If I stamp on a friend's corn, his outcry is genuine—he confounds ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... new vistas of what can be done with time that was wasted in former years have opened before me that time seems to me the greatest luxury in the world—time that was formerly wasted and now is used! I hope that does not sound priggish. I have tried to show that I value highly the privilege of associating with my fellows, and that I like their ways and their talk and their company. What I mean by this paean to time is that I can have company in a ...
— The Old Game - A Retrospect after Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon • Samuel G. Blythe
... fine and frosty a kind of devil seemed to creep into me. I have been so good since Saturday, so when Malcolm said, in his usual prim, priggish voice, "Miss Travers, may I have the pleasure of taking you for a little exercise," I jumped up without consulting Lady Katherine, and went and put my things on, and ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... forbear: my American vocabulary is limited. Outre mer, outres moeurs, as Mr. Walkley might say in some guarded allusion to Paul Bourget. . . . I shall be sorry to see poker take the place of roulette, and the Christ Church meadows turned into a ranch for priggish cowboys, or Addison's Walk re-named the Cake Walk. But no, I believe Mr. Rhodes, if there was just a touch of malice in his testament, realised that Oxford manners were stronger than the American want of them. Oxford may be wounded, but ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... to have you regard John Strong as an ignorant or inferior person, Rita," she said gently, knowing that she seemed priggish, but encouraged by ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... at him. "Don't be priggish," she said. "Dade and Malcolm have nothing to do with the running of this ranch. I want you to go with me, because I am going to buy some cattle and I want you to confirm ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... volunteered himself. He could not say that Billy employed the wrong tailor; it would show only gross ignorance or temper to say so. But just the things in which he felt himself superior, utterly different in fact from Billy, were the stupid, priggish things that no one boasts of. He read a good deal; he thought a good deal; he knew he might have had a future, and the bitterness of his heart lay in the fact that at fifteen years later in life than Billy he was still so completely a slave to all that ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... joy. He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to warn and rebuke and improve the occasion. But St. Francis's asceticism is the only kind of asceticism that has any charm, the self-denial, namely, that springs from a ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... discovered that Master Harry Sandford of England, the priggish little boy in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore, who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly endless succession of girls' books. I came across a nest of fifteen of them ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... liked, and I pleaded guilty to a moment's gratification at the announcement that Pethel liked me. But I did not go and seek him in the baccarat-room. A great character assuredly he was, but of a kind with which (I say it at the risk of seeming priggish) I prefer not ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm
... burgesses of London, and enrolled in the lists of freemen. On such occasions the city magnates hold high festival, and by their graceful hospitality inspire every breast with generous sympathy. Formal and priggish persons are said to exist who object to the cost of such entertainments, and, in the spirit of Judas, ask why, instead of purchasing these dainty cates, the money is not distributed among the poor. Is it possible that they do not perceive that every farthing spent ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... fields with as finished an air of being unaware of him (particularly if he be a rather shabby painter no longer young) as if the encounter took place on a city sidewalk; but this woman was not of that priggish kind. Her straightforward glance recognised my existence as a fellow-being; and she further acknowledged it by a faint smile, which was of courtesy only, however, and admitted no reference to the fact that at the first sound of her voice I had leaped into the air, kicked ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... exertions. For, as I needn't tell you, Mr. Fakrash, riches alone don't make any fellow happy. You must have observed that they're apt to—well, to land him in all kinds of messes and worries.... I'm talking like a confounded copybook," he thought, "but I don't care how priggish I am if I ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Henry and his Bearer, Anna Ross the Orphan of Waterloo, Agathos, and many, many more, including a well-remembered American book, Melbourne House. The heroine of the last-named work, an odiously priggish child called Daisy Randolph, refused to sing on a Sunday when desired to do so by her mother. For this, most properly, she was whipped. A devoted black maid who shared Daisy's religious views, comforted her little mistress by bringing her a supper of fried oysters, ice-cream ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!—not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear—nay, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... a steady, sensible lad, with very rigid ideas of right and wrong. Not that there was anything "priggish" about him. On the contrary, he was always the foremost in any undertaking that ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... more charming volume, and that is saying a very great deal. From the first to the last the book overflows with the strange knowledge of child-nature which so rarely survives childhood; and moreover, with inexhaustible quiet humor, which is never anything but innocent and well-bred, never priggish, and ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... means!" snapped the Senator, pricked in his pride and in his sense of responsibility as a go-between. He pushed a button in the row on his study table. "This new job as mayor seems to be playing some sort of a devil's trick with Stewart. I'll admit, Daunt, that I didn't relish some of the priggish preachment on politics mouthed by him in his office when we were there. But I didn't pay much attention—any more than I did to his exaggerated flourish in the way he attended to city business. ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... find the man he had sought, he finished hastily. As he went out, Silas Trimmer, though looking straight in his direction, did not seem to be at all aware of Bobby's approach. He was deep in a business discussion with his priggish son-in-law. ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... laugh, and Saffy into silent tears, for she thought she had made a fool of herself. She was not a priggish child, and did not deserve the mockery with which her barbarian brother invaded her little temple. She was such a true child that her mother was her neighbor, and present to all her being—not her eyes only or her brain, but her ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... lack of ideas, will never be brilliant on an occasion when he longs to outshine the stars. Living at one's best is constant preparation for instant use. It can never make one over-precise, self-conscious, affected, or priggish. Education, in its highest sense, is conscious training of mind or body to act unconsciously. It is conscious formation of mental habits, not mere acquisition ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... at my age one is naturally experimenting, and trying to find one's (with a laugh)—well, it sounds priggish, but one's medium of expression. I shall find out what I want to do directly, but I think I shall always be able to earn enough to live on. Well, I have ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... priggish, but it must be borne in mind that John Ellery was very, very fresh from the theological school, where young divines are taught to take themselves seriously. He was ashamed of himself as soon as he said it, which proved that his case ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... all careless of himself. Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age—alas! a drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer—the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... glens, masculine women, bare-legged men, priggish book-worms, more violence, physical excellence, and blood. Always blood,—and the superiority of physical attainments." "And how do you ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... his previous and subsequent ideas moved into harmonious cooerdination and subordination, when once he had this universal key to insight. Applying it wholesale as he did, innumerable truths unobserved till then had to fall into his gamebag. And his peculiar trick, a priggish infirmity in daily intercourse, of treating every smallest thing by abstract law, was here a merit. Add his sleuth-hound scent for what he was after, and his untiring pertinacity, to his priority in perceiving the one great truth and you fully ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... glance, and the thought crossed her mind uncomfortably that she had perhaps made a mistake, a serious mistake, in asking this priggish-looking Englishman to come to the Chalet des Muguets. He evidently did not like ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sister and myself when I broke to her the news that I must be against her. Impulsive in all her moods, and ungoverned in her emotions, she displayed much bitterness and an anger that her disappointment may excuse. I have little doubt that I, on my part, was formal, priggish, perhaps absurd; all these faults she charged me with. You can not put great ideas in a boy's head without puffing him up; I was doing at cost to myself what I was convinced was my duty; it is only too likely that I gave myself some airs during the performance. Might I not ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... pronounced, "those are thoroughly second-rate ideas, the result of a perfectly superficial view. Excuse my possibly priggish tone, but they really attribute to my dear detached friend a part he's quite incapable of playing. He can neither make trouble nor take trouble; no trouble could ever either have come out of him or have got into him. Moreover," our young ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... a moment of inspiration. "In the strictest sense a boy," was Mr. Gladstone's expressive phrase in his controversy with Colonel Dopping. For my own part, I confess to a frank dislike of boys. I dislike them equally whether they are priggish boys, like Kenelm Chillingly, who asked his mother if she was never overpowered by a sense of her own identity; or sentimental boys, like Dibbins in Basil the Schoolboy, who, discussing with a friend how to spend ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... word "ideals" had grown out-of-date and priggish—we had substituted for it the more robust word "ambitions." Today ideals have come back to their place in our vocabulary. We have forgotten that we ever had ambitions, but at this moment men are drowning for ideals in the mud ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... nobility and self-sacrifice of his life, he gradually wins himself a position, and ultimately marries the prettiest girl in the book. His character is, on the whole, well drawn, and the authors have almost succeeded in making him good without making him priggish. The method, however, by which the story is told is extremely tiresome. It consists of an interminable series of long letters by different people and of extracts from various diaries. The book consequently is piecemeal and unsatisfactory. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be "English," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English." There is also this serious disadvantage about "English," that if we wrote the best "English" in the world, probably the English themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stopping to bestow a smile on the elder girl's pleasant face. "But you can't understand why I am so happy. You don't belong to our set, and therefore know very little about Ada's conceit and—yes, I shall say it—priggish ways. She's just as horrid as can be, and I hate her," wound up the malicious monkey, quite reckless of the ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... particular the desire to seem manly, increases. If a debased public opinion demands of a boy the cheap manliness of profanity, tobacco, and irreverence, the demand creates a plentiful supply, while it also suppresses as priggish or "pi" any avowed or suspected devotion to higher ideals. A healthy public opinion, working in harmony with a boy's nobler instincts, calls forth in him an earnest devotion to high ideals, and causes him to exercise, on the development of his powers and in a crusade against ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... of differentiation is equally true on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix up England and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire. One man may say, "Why should the jolly English inns and villages be swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?" Another may say, "Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to your snobbish old squirarchy?" But both these views are only versions of the same view of a great American: "God never made one people ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... "I thought I knew him. He seemed an ordinary, rather priggish, opinionated country boy, and I wrote and said—Oh, I said that the world is the world; take it as it is. You wrote differently, and he ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... appreciated. He is a profound psychologist, a force in literature, and his style is very pure and attractive. He advocates resignation and the domestic virtues, yet his books are neither dull, nor tiresome, nor priggish; and as he has advanced in years and experience M. Bazin has shown an increasing ambition to deal with larger problems than are involved for instance, in the innocent love-affairs of 'Ma Tante Giron' (1886), ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... myself presumptuous and priggish in the memory. But I did mean truly by him. I began to question him, and by slow degrees, in broken hints, and in jets of reply, drew from him the facts. When at length he saw that I understood, he burst into tears, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... though he had some faults, being as proud as was endurable, as shy as a child, and altogether endowed with a full appreciation, to say the least, of his own charms and merits: but he was sincere, and loyal, and tender; well cultivated, yet not priggish or pedantic; brave, well-bred, and high-principled; handsome besides. I knew him thoroughly; I had held him on my lap, fed him with sugar-plums, soothed his child-sorrows, and scolded his naughtiness, many a time; I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... Jane!" said Rosamund. "I am not a very good girl myself, and perhaps that is why I partly understand her. At the present moment I hate my position. I like Mr. and Mrs. Merriman very well, and some of the girls; but I can't stand that priggish Lucy. Perhaps that is why I comprehend Irene—anyhow, if I may ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... which I particularly dislike—heat, and crowds, and cricket." It certainly was a rather priggish answer, but let me say in self-defence that before I left the school I had become as keen on "Lord's," as ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the world. Indeed, there is none other like it, and never will be. This Jew hounds me to death, holding up the thing before mine eyes. Even Saint Simon, that priggish little duke of ours, tells me that France should have this stone, that it is a dignity which should not be allowed to pass away from her. But how can France, bankrupt as she is, afford a little trifle which costs three ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... a world of fiction. In The Three Clerks, the young men who give the tale its title are all well drawn. To accomplish this in the cases of Alaric and Charley Tudor was easy enough for a skilled writer, but to breathe life into Harry Norman was difficult. At first he appears to be a lay-figure, a priggish dummy of an immaculate hero, a failure in portraiture; but toward the end of the book it is borne in on us that our dislike had been aroused by the lifelike nature of the painting, dislike toward a real man, priggish indeed in many ways, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... what is commonly called priggish when a man, in the style of Mr. Barlow, is always imploring the boy who wins a race or gets a prize to turn his thoughts higher and to take no credit to himself for what is only a piece of good fortune, and is not so great a performance after all. It is easy to say ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful. For the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life. Sometimes in an archaeological novel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath the learning, and I dare ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... that not even in fairyland can two and two make five; he can state quite calmly that the weakness of Feminism is that it drives the woman from the freedom of the home to the slavery of the world; he can make priggish clergymen, who accuse him of joking and taking the name of the Lord in vain, bite their words by explaining that to make a joke of anything is not to take it in vain. As an essayist, Chesterton stands apart from his contemporaries. Of older essayists I can think of none who could in any way be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... this might be forgiven on the plea that where so many names of the strong and powerful bid for recognition, a good way to avoid jealousies, is to ignore them all. So speaks proud and pious Philadelphia—snug, smug, prosperous, priggish and pedantic Philadelphia. But how about these five supremely great names—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Stephen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... heat and the toil with brave, unflinching hearts—these are the ones who are developing a moral fiber and strength of will which will stand in the day of stress. Better a thousand times such training as this in the thick of life's real conflicts than any volitional calisthenics or priggish self-denials entered into solely for the training of ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... absurd," said Rosalind Merton, sidling up to Maggie and casting some disdainful glances at poor Priscilla, "the conceit of some people! Of all forms of conceit, preserve me from the priggish style." ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... another impatient and inconsiderate creature upon the globe as yourself. It would be unpardonably rude in us to send the man away, if he is a charlatan, without letting him see me. Have him up, by all means, and let us hear what priggish nonsense he has to say. He will feel the easier ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of a flippant, vulgar mind. Boltt had a wider public than Lensley. Boltt, a tall, thin, stooping man, with peering eyes, had discovered "the human note" of which Gilbert's editor prated continually. He was a precise, priggish man, extraordinarily vain though no vainer than Lensley, who, however, had an easy manner that Boltt would never acquire. He spoke in the way in which one might expect a "reduced gentlewoman, poor dear!" to speak, and there was something about him that made a man long ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... able even to report such conversations as he said he had had with North Wind, had I not known already that some children are profound in metaphysics. But a fear crosses me, lest, by telling so much about my friend, I should lead people to mistake him for one of those consequential, priggish little monsters, who are always trying to say clever things, and looking to see whether people appreciate them. When a child like that dies, instead of having a silly book written about him, he should be stuffed like one of those awful big-headed fishes you see in museums. But Diamond never ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... Crimble made the point with gaiety. "I don't know what I mightn't do to him—and yet it's not of my temptation to violence, after all, that I'm most afraid. It's of the brutal mistake of one's breaking—with one's priggish, precious modernity and one's possibly futile discriminations—into a general situation or composition, as we say, so serene and sound and right. What should one do here, out of respect for that felicity, but hold one's breath and walk on tip-toe? The very celebrations and consecrations, ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... so sure that the fault is theirs,' was the reply. 'She is a priggish little puss, who ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really right, just as Browning ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... marvellous—but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of our leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons—who either started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight and did all the other priggish things they thought would look well in a biography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement. So money, after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as you were yesterday she cannot hope for friends any more ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... be," continued Trenchard in his English voice. (He told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible priggish superiority.) "Here in Russia you go up and down so. You've no restraint. Now if ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... not prepared for this. At first when she had conceived the plan of taking the hot journey down to Baltimore staying the night with a friend and then coming out to see her brother, she had felt rather consciously virtuous, hoped he wouldn't be priggish or resentful about her not having come before—but walking here with him under the trees seemed such a little thing, and surprisingly a ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mentor nettled her, his attitude seemed to her priggish and dictatorial, and as the sun disappearing behind a sudden cloud, so her childish merriment quickly gave place to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... found himself slipping into the manner which seemed more natural, and then he wondered if his policy of aloofness might not savor of the priggish. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... marriage only for reasons of State, that is, for the good of the country. Still, for all that, he is a man; and, as a man, he likes to follow whither his heart leads. It is an unjust, ungrateful and priggish thing to forbid, or to desire to forbid, a prince from following his inclinations in this matter; of course, as long as the lady has no influence upon the Government of the country. From her point of view she occupies an exceptional position, and ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a concerted pressure to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it was inevitable that every sort of evangelical appeal should have been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in the school. We ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... claimed to be the debate in the city council of Boston on his plans for a new city hall, which were afterward adopted. The speeches in Irish brogue, Teutonic Jargon, and down-east Yankee dialect, with utterances interposed here and there by solemnly priggish members, were inimitable. His pet antipathy seemed to be the bishop of the diocese, Dr. Eastburn. Stories were told to the effect that Gilman, early in life, had desired to take orders in the Protestant Episcopal Church, but that the bishop refused to ordain him, on the ground that he lacked the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a very creditable ride indeed," insisted Wallie, in his most patronizing and priggish manner. He found it very hard to be generous, ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... respect for his superior officer on the Supervisor's part encouraged Brent to deliver from time to time rather priggish little homilies on the way to run a Forest. California John listened, but with a sardonic smile concealed beneath his sun-bleached moustache. After a little, however, Brent became more inclined to bring home the personal application. Then California ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... on that day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot and made his treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not turned back. The praise given to him is not a priggish fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions have illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have been rather unfair to Penn even in picking their praises; and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways and that an open mind is open on ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... preceptor, how to win Johnson's warmest regard. He was the most eminent of the younger generation who now looked up to Johnson as a venerable relic from the past. Another was young Burke, that very priggish and silly young man as he seems to have been, whose loss, none the less, broke the tender heart of his father. Friendships, now more interesting, were those with two of the most distinguished authoresses of the day. One of them was Hannah More, who was about this ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen |
