"Hackneyed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... halls, the insipidly emphatic pretentiousness of the Casino itself—Durkin could never quite decide whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building or of a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked—the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvet of indolence—it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hot revolt, as had so often ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Garofalo, how this language reminds me of that of some of the classical criminologists—do you remember it?—who tried to combat the positivist school with language too much like this of yours, which conceals behind hackneyed phrases, the utter lack of ideas to oppose to the hated, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... times allow you for solid serious reading. Still, after all, you have them; you can at least pulverise your friends with the sight; and what have they to show against them? Probably some miserable score or so of half-bindings, such as lead you scornfully to quote the hackneyed couplet concerning the poor Indian whose untutored mind clothes him before but leaves him bare behind. Let us thank the gods that such things are: that to some of us they give not poverty nor riches but a few good books in whole bindings. ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... herself to contemplating the ultimate mysteries of existence and, in my eyes, the fact that Indian thought diverges widely from our own popular thought is a positive merit. In intellectual and philosophical pursuits we want new ideas and Indian ideas are not familiar or hackneyed in the west, though I think that more European philosophers and mystics have arrived at similar ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... acting consul of the Republic of Mexico, who had the singular consular virtue of sympathizing warmly with the free North, the General's attentions were something more sincere than the hackneyed "assurances of distinguished consideration" so necessary to diplomatic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a row of lurid lamps, to admire some painted men and women mincing up and down the stage, or peer through two telescopes at forests of painted calico and moons cut out of pasteboard, or listen to hackneyed airs which have been sung and resung a hundred times—worn up, in short, like an ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... nearly "Not slaves, but souls." It is to the point, in passing, to note that in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred to as "souls." The great Pope's phrase, hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in the best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with aristocracies, or was of a ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of those instances where persecution proved successful. It is a hackneyed saying that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church;" and it is true that lofty virtues have been generally developed by self-sacrifice and martyrdom, and that only through great tribulation have permanent blessings been secured. The ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... undoubted poetess of a high and fine order as regards the first requisites of her art—imagination and expression.... She is a most remarkable writer, and her volumes contain not a little which the lovers of poetry will never willingly let die,' a phrase then not quite so hackneyed as it has since become. The 'Atlas'[102] asserted that 'the present volumes show extraordinary powers, and, abating the failings of which all the followers of Tennyson are guilty, extraordinary genius.' More influential even than these, 'Blackwood'[103] paid her the compliment of a whole article, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Character Study; but its recent popularity seems to warrant its being treated separately. Its chief distinction is that it is written in the broken English used by the uneducated classes of our own country, and by foreigners. Its plot is either very slight or hopelessly hackneyed, and it is redeemed from sheer commonplace only by its picturesque language. It is usually told in the first person by some English-murdering ignoramus. It is simple, and sometimes has a homely pathos. It may present character as either active or inactive, though usually ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Hackneyed phrases of condolence never yet comforted a man in the hour of trouble, and I am not going to try their effect in your case. And yet let me say, in heartfelt earnest, that I was deeply pained to hear of your sudden and ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... involuntarily; yet he barely lifts the veil from his own childhood, and has much more to say of external events and older people than of himself and his young companions. How valuable is the story of George Washington and his hatchet, hackneyed as it has become! What do we know of the boyhood of Franklin, Webster, Seward and Longfellow? Nothing, or ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... times at random as if his thoughts were roving elsewhere: they were not unpleasant ones, apparently, for he smiled twice or thrice to himself, much less icily than usual. At last he spoke abruptly, after a long pause—Miss Tresilyan's name had not once been mentioned—"Hal, you know that old hackneyed phrase, about 'a woman to die for?' I think we have seen one to-day who is worth living for; which is ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... Capitol and the White House. Built by a man of wealth, it bears to this day the impress of the large ideas and quiet elegance of colonial times; but the shadow which speedily fell across it made it a marked place even in those early days. While it has always escaped the hackneyed epithet of "haunted," families that have moved in have as quickly moved out, giving as their excuse that no happiness was to be found there and that sleep was impossible under its roof. That there was some reason for this lack of rest within walls which were not without their tragic reminiscences, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... is hackneyed and old—what can I say about the Louvre which will be new to the reader? However, to write a book on Paris, and make no mention of the Louvre, would be like acting the play of Hamlet, with Hamlet ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... taken place within the last hour. The great square, as well as the streets leading to it was, with the exception of a small space, packed with people, as were the roofs of the buildings abutting on the square, yet the silence was so profound that, to use the hackneyed expression, one might have heard a pin drop. The small space left vacant consisted of an area some thirty feet square, bounded on one side by the sacrificial altar, and on the other by the front row of spectators, squatting on the ground, these evidently being, from the magnificence ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... anxious, intent young face with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them on at the ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... serve his time to every trade, Save censure.—Critics all are ready made. Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, got by rote, With just enough of learning to misquote; A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault, A turn for punning—call it Attic salt: Fear not to lie, 'twill seem a lucky hit, Shrink ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to get into such intimate contact with his great predecessor, and yet to remain as absolutely unaffected by him as Shakespeare himself was by Voltaire. It is unnecessary to dwell further upon so hackneyed a subject; but one instance may be given of the lengths to which this dramatic insensibility of Voltaire's was able to go—his adaptation of Julius Caesar for the French stage. A comparison of the two pieces should be made by anyone who wishes to realise fully, not only the degradation ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... indifferently provided. All that is required for a perfect community of feeling is a mutual recognition of, and a common respect for, certain great moral rules, without which there can exist no esteem between the upright. The alliance of knaves depends on motives so hackneyed and obvious, that we abstain from any illustration of its principle as a work of supererogation. The Signor Grimaldi and Melchior de Willading were both very upright and justly-minded men, as men go, in intention at least, and their opposite peculiarities and opinions had served, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... truthful man in Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... compound sentence. We have examples in the phrases, "[Greek: pleion touton]" and "plus his," above. Of such a construction our language admits no real example; that is, no exact parallel. But we have an imitation of it in the phrase than whom, as in this hackneyed example from Milton: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... marked the general limit of their ideals, and, as a class, they cared little for works of fancy, for pathos, or for fine thought as such. To a people of this nature the Homeric epos would be inacceptable, and the post-Homeric epic, with its conventional atmosphere, its trite and hackneyed diction, and its insincere sentiment, would be anathema. We can imagine, therefore, that among such folk a settler, of Aeolic origin like Hesiod, who clearly was well acquainted with the Ionian ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... hackneyed use of contents as a singular noun. An anonymous correspondent of "N. & Q." has already pointed out one in Measure for Measure, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... which may once have been striking and effective, or witty and felicitous, but which have become worn out by oft-repeated use, should be avoided. The following hackneyed phrases will serve to illustrate: "The staff of life," "gave up the ship," "counterfeit presentment," "the hymeneal altar," "bold as a lion," "throw cold water upon," "the rose upon the cheek," "lords of creation," ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic, neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put in. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed, quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere, there ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The hackneyed simile of the cat and the mouse seemed to me to be especially applicable in the present instance. In one breath I was told that there would be many interviews of the kind I was then enjoying (?), and in the next that my destination was Siberia. It was certainly ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... his credit as the spicy element in his works. But woe to the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the trite phrases of everyday parlance, as the "yester-night monster blooms of modern ink-flingers," as Schopenhauer says! When platitudes, hackneyed, feeble, and vulgar phrases are the rule, and the bad and the corrupt become refreshing exceptions, then all that is strong, distinguished, and beautiful perforce acquires an evil odour. From which it follows that, in Germany, the well-known experience which ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... rules have no longer any vogue; they were made by unreflecting minds, or by lovers of routine for other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling and passion." ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... circumstances. Many parents practice crying "Wolf! wolf!" to their children, and call the practice a drill of self-control; but they meet inevitably with the familiar consequences: when the real wolf comes the hackneyed cry, ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... pocket five rolls containing each one hundred louis d'or—a slight consolation for my heart, which was almost broken by our cruel separation! During the last twenty-four hours we could boast of no other eloquence but that which finds expression in tears, in sobs, and in those hackneyed but energetic exclamations, which two happy lovers are sure to address to reason, when in its sternness it compels them to part from one another in the very height of their felicity. Henriette did not endeavour to lure me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of good feeling is enjoined both by Precept and Hope. Who can resist such appeals to that kindness which increases the happiness of its possessor? With these reiterated words of counsel and of affection, let us take present leave of our readers, by wishing them in hackneyed phrase, but with unhackneyed spirit, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... helped. Besides, though taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original music like that, different from the conventional rut, would rapidly have a great vogue as it would be a decided novelty for Dublin's musical world after the usual hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a confiding public by Ivan St Austell and Hilton St Just and their genus omne. Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt he could with all the cards in his hand and he had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win a high place in the city's esteem ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which there is nothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly new powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... moral feelings or virtues," replied my neighbour easily. "They are not quite as formal and hackneyed now as they were in the olden time, when some of the favourite toasts were 'May the pleasure of the evening bear the reflections of the morning!' 'May the friends of our youth be the companions of our old age!' 'May the honest heart never feel distress!' 'May the ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wretched was all which proceeded from his hand! He was stopped at every step by his ignorance of the very first principles: simple ignorance of the mechanical part of his art chilled all inspiration and formed an impassable barrier to his imagination. His brush returned involuntarily to hackneyed forms: hands folded themselves in a set attitude; heads dared not make any unusual turn; the very garments turned out commonplace, and would not drape themselves to any unaccustomed posture of the body. And he felt ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the merely material point of view could ask for. I refused, because I felt certain that you and I did not love each other—however much we may have liked and respected each other—as a man and woman ought to do, unless they become guilty of a great sin against each other. To put it in a very hackneyed way, we were not each other's affinities. I had already found mine—and I think, and hope, that you have found yours—and I wish you all the good fortune that you ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... for my pupils, I strive to keep away from the beaten track of the hackneyed. The mistake made by many teachers is to give far too difficult music. Why should I teach an old war-horse which the pupil has to struggle over for six months without being really able to master, and which he will thoroughly hate at the end of that time? ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... vehemence. This change had been wrought in Zillah—the old, unreasoning passion had left her. A real affliction had brought out, by its gradual renovating and creative force, all the good that was in her. That the uses of adversity are sweet, is a hackneyed Shakspeareanism, but it is forever true, and nowhere was its truth more fully displayed than here. Formerly it happened that an ordinary check in the way of her desires was sufficient to send her almost ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the other, without regard to justice or decency. The word of a king, 'Go thou and do likewise,' makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink before it.(3) If there are watchwords for the rabble, have not the polite and fashionable their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome, unmeaning jargon as well? Both are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice, ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain rather less than the nearest dentist could have told him, and who boasted of the ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which he carried ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... surrounding country from its outbreaks that the channel was made by the Romans B.C. 271, the first of several experiments which resulted in these cascades, which have been more sung and oftener painted than any other in the world. The beauty of Terni is so hackneyed that enthusiasm over it becomes cockney, yet the beauty of hackneyed things is as eternal as the verity of truisms, and no more loses its charm than the other its point. But one must not talk about it. The foaming torrent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... though, I should like to offer a word or two of suggestion. It will undeniably be to your profit to pay attention to this play. It is not composed in the hackneyed style, is quite unlike other plays; nor does it contain filthy lines that one must not repeat. In this comedy you will meet no perjured pimp, or unprincipled courtesan, or braggart captain. Let not my statement that the Aetolians and Eleans are at war alarm you: engagements ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... furniture, is distinguished, not for its costliness and profusion, but for a pervading air of graceful originality. She is quite sensible of the regard due to the reigning fashion of the day, but her own tasteful discrimination is always perceptible. She instinctively avoids every thing that is hackneyed, vulgar, and common place, and uniformly succeeds in pleasing by the judicious ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... open standing room they can find at a table, and sup on whatever viands happen to be opposite them. Maybe there is a certain stony sameness about the food, a harping ad infinitum on some eight or ten hackneyed culinary ideas which one always finds where, as here, food and drink for a great many relays of people are provided by contract; but so long as chicken and jelly and fairly wholesome wine, with plenty of that best of antidotal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... attains the one, he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both united together from one head." Surely true philosophy, if we may call so serene a state of mind by that hackneyed word, never reached, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... so,' I answered. The word 'always' struck me with a little sharp pain, almost like a wound. Yes, I supposed it would be always. I was neither pretty nor attractive. What issue could there be for me out of that dull hackneyed round of daily duties which makes up the sum ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... in general commensurate with selfishness of feeling: men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world are scrupulous avoiders ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the wake of the great sharks in the savage hunting in the sea. There is constant going and coming through those superb white and gold salons, a slamming of doors, an unbroken current of insolent extortion of the most hackneyed type, attracted from the four corners of Paris and the suburbs by that enormous fortune and ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... The subject is too hackneyed, and, indeed, possesses too little interest, to induce us to give more than an outline of what passed. The captain and the chaplain belonged to that class of friends, which may be termed argumentative. Their constant discussions were a strong link in the chain ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... himself, "feature for feature, down to the very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... everything else. By free will we mean Independence—or that which does not merge away into something else—so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor slave-will—but a different approximation for every so-called person toward one or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... apocalypse. There was something unique about the desolate grandeur of the novel surroundings that would cause a man of the Sir Charles Coldstream type to say there "is something in it," and the most hackneyed man of the world would acknowledge a new sensation. It was midnight, and the sun shone with gleaming splendor over all this waste of ice and sea and granite; on one hand Wrangel Island appeared in well-defined ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... aspects of life, which form her one freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his guild—his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of 'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,' 'Companions of the New Life'; and in the treatment of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... idioms of language and character, and abounding in novelties in type which are no novelties to those familiar with popular life—would be doing them faint justice. They embody a new and perfectly truthful conception of one of the multitude, and have nothing that is hackneyed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... small figures which he had sketched, suggestions which afterwards became the splendid monuments of Silmee and Blackhawk. He never lost the effect of the noble gestures which I had reproduced for him. The nude red man was a hackneyed subject, but Brown Bear with his robe, afforded precisely the stimulus of which he stood ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington. Subsequently his brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was keeping open for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department. To the mortification and chagrin of his brothers, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his article, the writer should eliminate (1) superfluous words, (2) trite phrases, (3) general, colorless words, (4) terms unfamiliar to the average reader, unless they are explained, (5) words with a connotation inappropriate to the context, (6) hackneyed and mixed metaphors. The effectiveness of the expression may often be strengthened by the addition of specific, picture-making, imitative, and connotative words, as well as of figures of speech that clarify the ideas and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... as the boring and question-begging "gags" of "Law and Order," "Patriot first, and Party-man afterwards," "Hand over to the tender mercies, &c.," "Disintegration of the Empire," or even that most hackneyed of political phrases, "Grand Old Man" itself. Now, if any one took credit to himself for never, never having uttered the "Acre and Cow" Shibboleth, or made use of any others of these soul-sickening bits of polemical claptrap, Mr. Punch could ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... Sonata in the same key—have you mastered its content? The Preludes are a perfect field for the "prospector"; though Essipoff and Arthur Friedheim played them in a single program. Nor must we overlook the so-called hackneyed valses, the tinkling charm of the one in G-flat, the elegiac quality of the one in B minor. The Barcarolle is only for heroes. So I do not set it down in malice against the student or the everyday virtuosos that he—or she—does not attempt it. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... gathered together for form, and as much influenced by party as higher sentiments. Going to church was held more genteel than going to meeting. The principal tradesmen of the neighbouring great houses deemed it more "aristocratic;" using a favourite and hackneyed epithet which only expressed their own servility. About the time the Church Commission issued, the congregation of Mowbray was approaching zero. There was an idea afloat for a time of making it the seat of a new bishopric; the cathedral was ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the inspiration of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Latium. If "conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror by art," the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language, so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms fell on the Latin ear in the mother-tongue. Poetical language is the key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical feeling; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... As to the hackneyed doctrine that derives the origin of music from the outward sounds of nature, none but poets could have conceived it, or lovers be justified in repeating it. Granting even that the singing of birds, the rippling of brooks, the murmuring of winds, might have suggested some idea, in the gradual ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... and stories of unfairness and cruelty in fighting that have appeared in the English papers, but with the names reversed. English soldiers had surrendered and then fired; had shot from beneath a Red Cross flag or had killed prisoners. The stories were simple and as hackneyed as most ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... also colour from the ground whence it springs. It has the tang of the soil as well as the savour of the blood. Fletcher of Saltoun's hackneyed epigram, 'Let me make a country's ballads, and let who will make its laws,' does not embody all the truth. A country and the race inhabiting it may not be responsible for the laws that govern it. But a country and a people may rightly be tried and judged by their ballads—their ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... with the theory of physical violence alone. Nor did I. Some one, I believe, exerted a peculiar force in order to get her into his power. What was that force? At first I thought it might have been the hackneyed knock-out drops, but tests by the coroner's physician eliminated that. Then I thought it might be one of the alkaloids, such as morphine, cocaine, and others. But it was not any of the usual things that was used to entice her away from her family and friends. >From tests that I have, made ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... "Dr. Hookwell," and "Dr. Johnson, his Religious Life and his Death." In this last work, the Quarterly Review observes, "Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up—or rather the line on which to hang out—much hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole." The writer concludes his reviewal: "We are sorry to have had to make such an exposure of a man, who, apart from the morbid excess of vanity which has evidently ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... was confirmed by an Englishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... not understand that the tripping little song, with its wild-wood life and movement—that the boy singing with the delight of a pure, fresh heart—told him, beyond the power of labored language, how hackneyed and blase he had become, how far and hopelessly he had drifted from the same ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... examining Taverner anent the whole matter, expressed his belief in the realness of the apparition. No doubt the medium of communication suffered much mental torture, and great excitement prevailed in the north of Ireland; but, however, to use a hackneyed phrase, "All's well that ends well." The apparition's mission to earth was fulfilled; for the young man's wrongs were redressed, and he remained for many years in secure possession of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... that I could think of; nor, indeed, could I recommend any one with full confidence. It would be a very desirable task for a young literary man, or, for that matter, for an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I know you may probably feel that this avowal ought to be expressed with more hesitation, veiled over by the hypocrisy of language, disguised by the hackneyed forms of mere sentiment, uttered like the assertions of a coquette, and degraded by that tampering with truth which makes the heart lie unto itself. Oh, yes!—perhaps, Charles, you may think that because ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... contemporary reports of Sir Walter Raleigh's deportment at this final moment of his life. In the place of these hackneyed narratives, we may perhaps quote the less-known words of another bystander, the republican Sir John Elyot, who was at that time a young man of twenty-eight. In his Monarchy of Man, which remained in manuscript until 1879, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... composition, in which the whole process and procedure of the Turkish Bath is treated historically, dramatically and realistically in seventeen movements. The title has not yet been definitely fixed, but it will probably be known as the Symphonie Bathetique, to differentiate it from TSCHAIKOVSKY'S hackneyed work. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... hackney-coach might produce, if it could carry as much in its head as it does in its body! The autobiography of a broken-down hackney-coach, would surely be as amusing as the autobiography of a broken-down hackneyed dramatist; and it might tell as much of its travels with the pole, as others have of their expeditions to it. How many stories might be related of the different people it had conveyed on matters of business or profit—pleasure ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Novel, that their tendency was towards what has come to be called "realism" in modern fiction literature. One uses this sadly overworked term with a certain sinking of the heart, yet it seems unavoidable. The very fact that the words "realism" and "romance" have become so hackneyed in critical parlance, makes it sure that they indicate a genuine distinction. As the Novel has developed, ramified and taken on a hundred guises of manifestation, and as criticism has striven to keep pace with such ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... with Drake in writing the Croaker Papers, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 to the Evening Post. These were of a merely local and temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, Marco Bozzaris—though declaimed until it has become hackneyed—gives him a sure title to remembrance; and his Alnwick Castle, a monody, half serious and half playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life, has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... with an enthusiasm that the elder woman felt for a moment, nor did either of them feel the verse hackneyed. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... faithful servant.' But, what are the people to think of our sincerity? What credit are they to give to our professions? It there nothing which whispers to that right honourable gentleman, that the crisis is too big, that the times are too gigantic, to be ruled by the hackneyed means ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... himself and with reason; but the cool sequestered path—its goal identical with that of the paths of Glory—finds man at peace with himself and with reason. The theme was not new before Gray made it peculiarly his own, and it has become somewhat hackneyed in the last two hundred years; but the fact that it is seldom unheard in any decade testifies to its permanency of appeal, and the fact that it was "ne'er so well express'd" as in the "Elegy" justifies our love ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... who looks below the surface will attach less importance to these than to the great changes in thought which have found in Oxford their inspiration, and which make it a city of pilgrimage for those interested in the development of England's real life. Matthew Arnold's famous description, hackneyed though it is by quotation, gives one aspect of Oxford, an aspect which will appeal to ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... universal, should have thrust out its fibres of light knitting into one the nations of the earth, when the lowest slave should find its true place and rightful work, and stand up, knowing itself divine. "To insure to every man the freest development of his faculties": he said over the hackneyed dogma again and again, while the heavy, hateful years of poverty rose before him that had trampled him down. "To insure to him the freest development," he did not need to wait for St. Simon, or the golden year, he thought with a dreary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... he disliked the man, did Michael go with Harry Del Mar. Like a burglar the man came, with infinite caution of silence, to the outhouse in Doctor Emory's back yard where Michael was a prisoner. Del Mar knew the theatre too well to venture any hackneyed melodramatic effect such as an electric torch. He felt his way in the darkness to the door of the outhouse, unlatched it, and entered softly, feeling with his hands for the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... necessary for an orator; the second with the treatment of the subject matter; the third with the form and delivery of a speech. Cicero says of this work in a letter (Fam. i. 9. 23) that it "does not deal in hackneyed rules and embraces the whole theory of oratory as laid down by Isocrates and Aristotle." (b) Brutus, or de claris oratoribus, a history of Roman eloquence containing much valuable information about his predecessors, drawn largely from the Chronicle (liber annalis) of Atticus (Sec.Sec. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... speeches for the Parliament, which should take the shine out of every one else and carry the school by storm? It was not a bad idea. But the chance would not come. No one could get up a fine speech on such a hackneyed subject as "That Rowing is a finer Sport than Cricket," or that "The Study of Science in Public Schools should be Abolished!" And when he did attempt to prepare an oration on the subject of Compulsory Football, ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... freedom, spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we must look ourselves and the German character in the face—this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our own past, our ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... like a summer, as the saying is, and for once they could say it even on the bleak northern spurs of the Delverton Hills. There were days upon days when that minor chain looked blue and noble as the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song, seen with an envious eye from the grimy outskirts of Northborough, and when from the hills themselves the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the pall of smoke that always overhung the town. On such days Normanthorpe House justified ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... be any question; there never has been any question. All the sensible people of all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one's self. Man, know thyself. These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them. Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... happily of opinion concerning the disposition of the Donna Violetta," coolly observed the oldest senator, a rare specimen of hackneyed and worldly morality, "we may look into our list of daily duties—what say the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... popular belief. And there is no reason to suppose that the explanations given by the priests did more than account for mythological stories, agreeably to the spirit and form of the received mythology, or deduce moral maxims from the representation, as hackneyed, as simple, and as ancient, as the generality of moral aphorisms are. But, as the intellectual progress of the audience advanced, philosophers, skeptical of the popular religion, delighted to draw from such imposing representations a thousand theories ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... New South Wales Government for the Admiralty, were built to "patrol the various recruiting grounds of the Fijian and Queensland planters and place the labour-traffic under the most rigid supervision." The remark quoted above was then, as it is now, quite a hackneyed one, much used by the gallant officers who commanded the one-gun-one-rocket-tube craft aforementioned. Likewise, the "highly irregular proceedings" were a naval synonym for some of the bloodiest slaving outrages ever perpetrated, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... the kingdom, but was one of the handsomest and cleverest men in Europe. As for the sudden passion with which Louis was inspired for his sister-in-law, physiology would perhaps supply an explanation by some hackneyed commonplace reasons, and nature by means of her mysterious affinity of characters. Madame had the most beautiful black eyes in the world; Louis, eyes as beautiful, but blue. Madame was laughter-loving and unreserved in her manners; Louis, melancholy and diffident. Summoned to meet each other for ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... very soul of the preacher; and the language, clear, vigorous, and modern, clothed these thoughts in the most impressive manner. There were none of the conventionalisms of the pulpit orator, who often weakens the strongest ideas by the hackneyed or ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... originality; it is cleverness; it is nimbleness of wit and beauty of phrase; it is grace; it is simplicity; it is restraint; it is tact. It is all these, and more. It is that intuition in a star man which forbids his beginning the same kind of story day after day with a fixed, hackneyed type of sentence, which makes him avoid triteness of expression. It is that something in him which compels him to avoid affectation, to love beauty and grace, born of simplicity, unadornedness. It is that inborn sense ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... perfectly. He did this in Ulysses, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed for ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... month's travelling, I did come back to England, I was startled to find that I had told the exact truth. England did break on me at once beautifully new and beautifully old. To land at Dover is the right way to approach England (most things that are hackneyed are right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... Educated, as we shall see hereafter, first in this school. Turner gave the hackneyed composition a strange power and freshness, in ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... The song, "I never have been false to thee," is, of itself, sufficient to establish General Morris's fame as a great poet—as a "potens magister affectuum"—and as a literary creator of a high order. It is a thoroughly fresh and effective poem on a subject as hackneyed as the highway; it is as deep as truth itself, yet light as the movement of a dance. We had almost forgotten, what the world will never forget, the matchless softness and transparent delicacy of "Near the Lake." Those lines, of themselves, unconsciously, court "the soft promoter of ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... person whom he supposes to have spoken and to whom he is replying. Still oftener, with the whole world,—in the ordinary meaning of the term,—which he takes to task, twisting a current idea into a paradox, or making use of a hackneyed phrase, or parodying some quotation or proverb. If we compare these scenes in miniature with one another, we find they are almost always variations of a comic theme with which we are well acquainted, that of ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... doubt about other things? (107) Your other strong point is that without assent action is impossible (108). But surely many actions of the dogmatist proceed upon mere probability. Nor do you gain by the use of the hackneyed argument of Antiochus (109). Where probability is, there the Academic has all the knowledge he wants (110). The argument of Antiochus that the Academics first admit that there are true and false visa ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... live as far as his mental life went in a world of books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love—the hackneyed expression came so readily to him. "She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books don't prepare one for the half-shades. Nobody can love without a flaw—we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... simultaneous from such a tutti as we have hardly heard from any orchestra. We can believe that Mr. Benedict was quite sincere in telling them he had not conducted a better orchestra in Europe. The other Overture to Masaniello was also splendidly played, but the composition is, to our taste, too hackneyed to fill out the programme of a Jenny Lind before the largest audience in the world. The accompaniments to the singing were usually given with sympathetic precision, and subdued shading or vigorous seconding, as the case ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... situations in life such as may induce him to suppress his name on the present occasion. He may be a writer new to publication, and unwilling to avow a character to which he is unaccustomed; or he may be a hackneyed author, who is ashamed of too frequent appearance, and employs this mystery, as the heroine of the old comedy used her mask, to attract the attention of those to whom her face had become too familiar. He may ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and others. Gwen had heard these every year, and they were always pretty much on the same theme. It is hard to be original at prize-givings, and the gentlemen who had been asked to "say a few words" might be forgiven if their remarks were somewhat hackneyed. Miss Roscoe read the examiners' report on the school, and the successes in the Matriculation and the Senior and Junior Oxfords. These the girls knew already, so, though they clapped heartily, it did not cause much excitement. Everyone ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... to revel in, and it was decorated with Japanese fans and Chinese lanterns, which gave it a very Old English effect. A young lady with a confidential voice favoured us with a long recitation about a little girl who died or did something equally hackneyed, and then the Major gave us a graphic account of a struggle he had with a wounded bear. I privately wished that the bears would win sometimes on these occasions; at least they wouldn't go vapouring about it afterwards. Before we had ...
— Reginald • Saki
... and flattering ir-restraint; he seemed to be leaving his heart bare to the Frenchman. Count Victor was by these last words transported to his native city, and his own far-off days of galliard. Why, in the name of Heaven! was he here listening to hackneyed tales of domestic tragedy and a stranger's reminiscences? Why did his mind continually linger round the rock of Doom, so noisy on its promontory, so sad, so stern, so like an ancient saga in its spirit? Cecile—he was amazed at it, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... places for Democratic office-seekers. Again the ardent supporters of State government ignored the latter charge and replied to the taxation argument by quoting the provisions of the Distribution Act. Altogether the discussion lacked freshness, force, and vigor—it was stale and hackneyed. Two years of growth and reflection had wrought a change in sentiment. The public mind had evidently settled down in favor of State organization. At the elections in April the people returned a large majority in favor of calling a ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... historical explanation, no reference to hackneyed categories in the card-index of Time. Whether his plan was dedicated to this world or to the glory of some invisible God, you may debate as you will, but Bismarck will be neither greater nor less because of flights ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... most human of all the saints, he is also one of the most amiable in all the senses of that hackneyed word—amiable according to the world, amiable according ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the unexpected arrival of a Presbyterian missionery in the midst of her coronation feast is too well known to repeat—and the tale of the landing of eight Bhuddist monks during the christening of her first child is now so hackneyed as to be irritating; therefore we will skip the minor incidents of the early part of her reign and mention a few of the progressive improvements on existing conditions which found their source in ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... play—something that you like, or if you do not, you should!" And very much to Crawford's delight, for she did not often sing, though she frequently hummed,—she broke out with voice and instrument into that finest, though worst-hackneyed, of modern love-ballads—"Ever of Thee." There are unaccountable fancies, in music as well as in personal regard, and one piece will sometimes make itself the very key-note of a human heart, without being in itself so pre-eminently beautiful as to command that distinction. Crawford ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... triumphant civilization. And herein appears a glimpse of the political mission of the American Union, destined itself to become still more comprehensive in the inevitable fluctuation and change of the political elements. It is a hackneyed theme that all the natural features of our country, its mountains, rivers, valleys, lakes, are on a grand scale; it is, therefore, meet that we should lead the civilized world in the movement ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... defenders of nunneries repeat, if they dare, their hackneyed denunciations of those who deny their sanctity. Here stand some of their own bishops and popes before us; and the anathemas must fall first upon mitres and tiaras! Americans will know how much confidence ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... a man of the people in the popular sense of that hackneyed phrase. Though himself poor, being a younger son, he came of a rich and influential family; he was patrician at heart; both his faults and his virtues, his proud incorruptibility and passionate, domineering ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... will do anything to insure the success of his plans? Yes; I told him all that, and yet I give up the game in despair as soon as I meet with a single circumstance that I can not instantly explain. It is evident that such a prisoner would not resort to old, hackneyed, commonplace expedients. Time, patience, and research are requisite to find a flaw in his defense. With such a man as he is, the more appearances are against my presumptions, and in favor of his narrative, the more certain it is that ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... of his life be of a varied character, and worth communicating to others, or to the world, the hero's later connexions are usually totally separated from those with whom he began the voyage, but whom the individual has outsailed, or who have drifted astray, or foundered on the passage. This hackneyed comparison holds good in another point. The numerous vessels of so many different sorts, and destined for such different purposes, which are launched in the same mighty ocean, although each endeavours to pursue its own course, are in every case more influenced by the winds and tides, which ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... a train drawing up at the neighboring station that calls me away from the second-hand store; for I never find myself able to resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It cannot cease to be impressive. I stand beside the track while the familiar monster writhes up to the station and disgorges its passengers,—suburbanly packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... us? Was it the weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed. Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Darby and Juliet," he remarked, as he looked anxiously into the bowl. "I am so tired of hackneyed pairs of names, that I've varied these. But, won't you send for some more water? I had to bring them with only a little, for fear I'd spill it, and they seem to have drunk it nearly ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... them who had not read a passage of Scripture for years, having shaken the dust off their Bibles, turned to the verses to which he referred, and when in the taverns, so intoxicated as to be scarcely able to stand, they, with maudlin utterances, and serio-comic grimaces, would unctiously quote these hackneyed texts in the pauses which intervened between ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... had natural courage. She felt that it could be stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bois dans mon verre, said someone. Do you see,' he added in an undertone, 'how well I pronounce French? What is it to one if one's a capacious brain, and understands everything, and knows a lot, and keeps pace with the age, if one's nothing of one's own, of oneself! One more storehouse for hackneyed commonplaces in the world; and what good does that do to anyone? No, better be stupid even, but in one's own way! One should have a flavour of one's own, one's individual flavour; that's the thing! And don't suppose that ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... which had evidently been spent on the arrangement of Mrs. Graham's "Liberty rags" and Oriental ware. When the soft yellow silk curtains were drawn, and a subdued light fell through the jewelled facets of an Eastern lamp upon the peacock fans and richly-toned Syrian rugs, and all the other hackneyed ornamentation by which "artistic" taste is supposed to be shown, Lettice could not but acknowledge that the room was charming. But her thoughts flew back instantly to the old study at home, with its solid oak furniture, its cushioned window-seats, its unfashionable ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... before reading the "Etchingham Letters." Sir Richard would wish me to erase it as hackneyed; but it applies to Kinglake's talk as accurately as to Virgil's writing, and I refuse to be defrauded ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... The districts to be traversed are furnished with excellent roads, and in part with railways, contain large and civilized towns, and are inhabited by a peaceable and industrious population. The difficulties, such as they are, can be overcome by the two necessaries for all except the most hackneyed excursions—time and money. In Java the former is, if anything, more important ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... observation not been so hackneyed, I would have advised Mr. Bull to mend his way; but he seemed so thoroughly astonished that further ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... affairs of this world than the world is willing to own. Eyes meet which have never met before, and glances thrill with expression which is strange. We contrast these pleasant sights and new emotions with hackneyed objects and worn sensations. Another glance and another thrill, and we spring into each other's arms. What ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... laughed silently, grimly, remembering the resentful, jealous impulse that had prompted his interruption when the boyish, handsome face of Beauvayse had leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her white-rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped, garrison compliment. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Quotations, containing the hackneyed Quotations in daily use, with names of Authors, and places in their works where they are ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... me. I did not wish to annoy you with hackneyed condolences or sing with you an elegiac duet; but I have not the less sympathized with your sorrows; I have even evolved a system out of them. Were I forsaken, I should deplore the blindness of the unfortunate creature who could renounce the happiness of possessing ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... with the Almighty might easily have roused a hostile sense of humour; but Dissent in its active and emotional forms kills the sense of humour; and, besides, there was a real, ungainly power in the man. Every phrase of his opening prayer was hackneyed; every gesture uncouth. But his heart was in it, and religious conviction is the most infectious thing in the world. He warmed, and his congregation warmed with him. The wild scene, too, did its part—the world of darkening moors spread out before them; the mountain wall behind them; ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... followed by silence so tense that, to make use of a much hackneyed expression, one might have heard a pin drop, and it lasted so long that the Queen grew white to the lips, and her eyes began to glitter ominously. Was it possible that the nobles—who but for the military ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... grave and sad, as he stood listening. It was possible to hear almost all the prayer through the red baize door, and the words, hackneyed though they were, and almost absurd in their pious sing-song, had a naif impressiveness and, to the listener, an ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the other side, I called to mind those truths That are the common-places of the schools— (A theme for boys, too hackneyed for their sires,) Yet, with a revelation's liveliness, In all their comprehensive bearings known 195 And visible to philosophers of old, Men who, to business of the world untrained, Lived in the shade; and to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... monastery. From his great mind originated the founding of the study of art upon the study of nature. His enthusiasm was perfectly delightful: he made it a rule never to pass a day without making some progress, or to retire to rest till he had produced some design. His brother sculptors, hackneyed in the trammels of assumed principles, for a time ridiculed his works, till, at length, in the year 1800, his merits hecame fully recognised; from which time till his death, in 1822, he stood unrivalled amidst the honours of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... a glyptic material. The introduction of mindless automatic machinery has starved out the chisel. Mouldings are run out for us by the mile, like iron from the rolling-mill or tunes from a musical-box, as cheap and as soulless. Forms innately beautiful thus become almost hateful, because hackneyed. If all the women we see were at once faultlessly beautiful and absolute duplicates of each other in the minutest details of feature, complexion, dress and figure, we should be in danger of conceiving an aversion to the sex. So there is a certain pleasure ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... upon a subject likely to be sufficiently hackneyed; and, having the advantage of coming out in a small cheap form—(prudently imitated from Murray's innovation with the tales of Byron, which was the death-blow to the system of verse in quarto)—it attained rapidly a measure of circulation above what had been reached either ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... bringing it forward; that dissolution or resignation are revolution and ruin and disgrace; that the caballers are wrong, quite wrong, but that we must look at the general question and the possible results (a hackneyed expression which may sound wise but of which I too well know the drift); that it may often be very honourable to abandon friends and supporters with whom we agree, to conciliate the shabbies with whom we ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... been vitiated, and who has contracted a depravity, both of sentiment and manners, which no degree of repentance can wholly efface? Besides, of true love they are absolutely incapable. Their passions have been much too hackneyed to admit so pure a flame. You cannot anticipate sincere and lasting respect from them. They have been so long accustomed to the company of those of our sex who deserve no esteem, that the greatest dignity and purity of character can never excite ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... Common Places, like that collected by Stobaeus out of Cicero, Seneca, Terence, Aristotle; but especially the book entitled 'Polyanthea,' provides short and effective sentences apt to any matter." Frequent resort to the Polyanthea caused many a good quotation to be hackneyed; the term of rhetoric, "a common-place," came then to mean a good saying made familiar by incessant quoting, and then in common speech, any trite saying good or bad, but commonly ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... through with it; to have rid the house of the last vestige of an uninvited and unwelcome guest. With which reflection Desmond sat down finally in the sanctuary of his study; lit a cheroot; and opened a battered original of Omar Khayyam, whose stately quatrains and exquisite imagery were less hackneyed then, than they have since become among ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... eagerly—for both were enthusiastic—sketching one of the most enchanting scenes that can well be imagined. We will not attempt the impossible. Description could not convey it. We can only refer the reader's imagination to the one old, hackneyed ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... trite and hackneyed claim of the Prussian megalomaniacs that they are an Imperial people, a super-race predestined by Nature and Providence to the domination of the world. It certainly seems a grotesque claim to assert on the part of a people who in their political and social life have shown themselves ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... had left Paris, and Giddens, the English painter, had gone back to London. Perhaps it was the spring, perhaps it was merely the law which decrees that the past can never be recaptured—whatever the cause, Stefan's flight had not wholly assuaged his restlessness. Of adventures in the hackneyed sense he had not thought. He was too fastidious for the vulgar sort, and had hitherto met no women who stirred his imagination. Moreover, he harbored the delusion that the failure of his great romance ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... seen the head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed. Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of our humanity," says he, "involves the persuasion that we cannot be owned as a tree or a brute." This, as every body knows, is one of the hackneyed commonplaces of the abolitionist. He never ceases to declaim about the injustice of slavery, because it regards, as he is pleased to assert, a man as a mere thing or a brute. Now, once for all, we freely admit that it were monstrously unjust to regard or treat a man otherwise ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Because it took me five years to love you? Remember, you were very cautious; you wouldn't let me see more than a bit at a time. But I love every bit of you—heart and soul, and body and brain; I love you as I never could love any other woman in the world—the world, Frida," he added, pointing the hackneyed ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... brings into connection the Anglo-Saxon race. It is in this showing of the different effects which the two classes of minds have upon the central figure of the story that one of its chief merits lies. The characters are original, and one does not recognize any of the hackneyed personages who are so apt to be considered indispensable to novelists, and which, dressed in one guise or another, are but the marionettes, which are all dominated by the same mind, moved by the same motive force. The men are all endowed with individualism ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... think not," she retorted. "And meantime, thank goodness, the term 'Brother' has put an end to that hackneyed form of refusal, 'I love you as a brother.' The sisters are only allowed to require the attention of the Brothers for a stated number of nights a week, and the work is well paid. On the other hand, the sisters escape all the duties they generally have to perform for their real brothers, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Fiesole and back by Settignano. There is a point on that road where we could get down and have an hour's ramble on the hillside. The view thence of Florence is most beautiful—far better than the hackneyed view of Fiesole. It is the view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures. That man had a decided feeling for landscape. Decidedly. But who looks at it to-day? Ah, the world is too much ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the sound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close to perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a less hackneyed word than "plunging," but though it would possibly have sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near perfection as it ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... inadequate as possible. They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to your goodness, I do not approach you, my Lords and Gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, to thank you for past favours: that path is so hackneyed by prostituted learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. Nor do I present this address with the venal soul of a servile author, looking for a continuation of those favours: I was bred to the plough, and am independent. I come to claim the common Scottish ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... pop His head within a lottery shop, And there he saw, with staring eyes, The drawing of the mammoth prize. "Ten millions! 'tis a pretty sum; I wish I had as much at home: I'd like to know, as I'm a sinner, What lucky fellow is the winner?" Conceive our traveler's amaze To hear again the hackneyed phrase. "What? no! not Nick Van Stann again? Faith! he's the luckiest of men. You may be sure we don't advance So rapidly as that in France: A house, the finest in the land; A lovely garden, nicely planned; A perfect angel of a wife, And gold enough to last a life; There never yet ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various |
