"Humbug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of that solemn tomfoolery, were "taught" by the arithmetic teachers in the academies of the eighteenth century, because they are utterly ignorant, and know themselves to be utterly ignorant, of the reality of the subject, and because, therefore, they have to humbug the parent and pass the time by unreal inventions. The case is not a bit better in the higher grade schools. They do not do so much of the bogus teaching of English, but they do ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... girl. But even if older boys and girls kept their mouths shut, the time would surely come when a growing mind would begin puzzling, reasoning, doubting, and by putting two and two together, would be forced to the conclusion that this pretty idea was only a make-believe, a myth, a humbug. A little further reflection might tell it that the myth must have been invented by some one, long ago, and was kept alive and carried on by people, generation after generation, on account of the value and influence it was found to have ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... surely can't suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug about Miss Schley or anything she has ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... book which can instruct one to read the human countenance correctly; and some special circumstance must have roused the suspicions of these four persons so much as to cause them to make these observations, and they were not as usual deceived by the humbug of this skilled actor, a past master in the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... or a humbug? a patriot or a pretender? Ask Vermont and she cries "Nulli secundus!" Ask New York and the reply ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... so prejudiced and so used to humbug that for the most part they do not in the least know their own motives for what they do. I will go to Saulsby ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... them in her prayers, she said; but the little white volcano almost laughed in her face, and the black diamond eyes twinkled furiously as they turned away to hide their scornful amusement—so strong was the nun's conviction that the new benefactress was a humbug. The Princess looked at the names quite calmly after she had written them—Sister Saint Paul, Sister Giovanna, and Sister Marius—and asked whether she had seen any of them during her visit. But the Mother Superior ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... saw the peculiar sting? They felt it; and one virtue in possessing an 'ideal' is that, lodging in you as it does, it insists upon the interior being furnished by your personal satisfaction, and not by the blindness or stupidity of the outer world. Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug. The ladies might desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure in deception. They had the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as nature or the fates did them no violence. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gave him such a kick. I think it was on his nose or his mouth. Then he actually dared to say: After all I'm well paid out, for what can one expect when one keeps company with such young monkeys, with such babies. Fine talk from him when he's not 14 himself yet. It was all humbug about his being 15 and he seems to be one of the idlest boys in the school, never anything but Satisfactory in his reports, and he's not in the fifth yet, but only in the fourth. Anyhow, we've settled our accounts. Cheeky devil. I shall never tell anyone ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... you were too sensible and practical a man," said the superintendent, sneering, "to be taken in by so palpable a humbug. Why, it reads like ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... spiritualists, socialists, disorganizers. They have in reality nothing new to offer; they are the old-clothes men of thought, harlequins juggling in old Hindoo raiment, striding along in old German May-fair rags, long since discarded—motley's their only wear—stalking Cagliostros and Kings of Humbug.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... publish any humbug, and I have placed a Brush in the hands of Mayor Cooper and Postmaster James of New York, as a ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... were any one disposed to question the value of my statements—could announce to the world my great discovery a thousand times a day, and very properly the world would decline to believe in me. The world would cry humbug, and I should have been unable, had I failed to find you, to convince the world that I was not a humbug. With the discovery of your eye, all that is changed. I shall have an ally in you, and that is valuable for the reason ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... mind. She should marry Mr. Jephson, who saved her life, or be the laughing stock of the country. I showed her up to herself, with her glass ball, and her teleopathy, and her sham love-letters, that she wrote herself, and all her humbug. She cried, and she fainted, and she carried on, but I went at her whenever she could listen to reason. So she said "Yes," and ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... will unhesitatingly accept your report of your own sensations and your hypotheses as to their cause; and, Esmeralda, when once your eyes behold that model man, be content, and go and take lessons of another, for either he is a pretentious humbug, careless of everything except his fees, or he is ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... Baby is bending the violet eyes of hers upon a piece of Moorish silk, let me clear my mind of humbug. I am no sentimentalist in this matter. I am not certain, yet, that "my lady" of to-day is the sole repository of every virtue; neither am I dogmatic about "necessary vice," the "irreducible minimum," and such-like ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... dear," said Miriam grateful and proud, "I feel such a humbug. You know when I wrote that letter to the Fraulein I said I was a member of the Church. I know what it will be, I shall have to take the ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... proceeded to make a short speech. He touched upon the rights of trade, the liberty of the press, the importance of fair dealing, and the benefits of printing; and concluded by advising his hearers to go the death for their rights, and 'not to stand no humbug.' Such was the effect of his eloquence, that the firm against which he wielded his oratorical thunder found it necessary to compromise matters by treating the entire concourse to a hogshead of wine. 'The company separated at ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... know myself.... But I'm not going to lose you like this. I'm not going to let you slip a second time. I was awake about it all last night. I don't care where you are, what your people are, nor very much whether you've kept quite clear of this medium humbug. I don't. You will in future. Anyhow. I've had a day and night to think it over. I had to come and try to find you. It's you. I've never forgotten you. Never. I'm not going to be ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... but suppose you have it. It is in the funds, mind. And now let me tell you what the funds are; which is necessary if you have not read my little book called Paper against Gold. The funds is no place at all, Jack. It is nothing, Jack. It is moonshine. It is a lie, a bubble, a fraud, a cheat, a humbug. And it is all these in the most perfect degree. People think that the funds is a place where money is kept. They think that it is a place which contains that which they have deposited. But the fact is, that the funds is a word which ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... am a humbug?" said Florence. A look came into her eyes which he could not quite fathom. It was a hungry look. They lit up for a moment, then faded, then an expression of resolve ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... man at hand competent for the job who will do the trick for five hundred, and only too pleased at the chance, says Cloete. . . George shuts his eyes tight at that sort of talk—but at the same time he thinks: Humbug! There can be no such man. And yet if there was such a man ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for add lang syne," as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went. ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there originally in the humblest possible way; and how many of the dregs of colonial society—the occupiers of the lowest rung on the colonial ladder—reached their new home with all the pomp and circumstance of quarter-deck sublimity, and all the humbug and pretension of real or fancied aristocracy. Is the result we see—for these contrasts are to be found plentifully in all the colonies at the Antipodes—what it ought to be, or not? That is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... to the discovery he had made touching the apprehended burglary; and his uncertainty was the greater, inasmuch as he had frequently heard the highest possible encomiums lavished upon Duncan's extraordinary powers of invention and humbug. ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... "Oh, that's all humbug!" cried one of the men, "just to make us remain. Mates, are we to go, or are we to stop and get abused ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... mortuis is founded on humbug. Humbug out of doors is necessary. It would not do for you and me to go into the High Street just now and say what we think about Mrs Proudie; but I don't suppose that kind of thing need to be kept up in here, between you and me. She was an uncomfortable woman,—so uncomfortable ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... in court for years past under every sort of circumstance, and if it had been required of him to select a character with which superstition and morbid humbug could have had nothing in common, he would have laid his hand upon the senior partner of Cathcart and Cathcart. Yet here was this sane man, taking this fantastic nonsense as if there were really something in it. He had first heard him speak of the subject ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... is what keeps you from promising me anything. But surely you do not care for him now. Why—why, you couldn't! The fellow who could show the white feather at such a time as this, and then try and cover up his cowardice by all that religious humbug, is not of your class, Nancy. He's a rank outsider. I'm sorry I was ever friends with him. Your father told me he was mad with himself for ever allowing ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... my part," said Sylvie, "a man tried to humbug me at the market wanting to know if I had seen him put on his shirt. Such bosh! There," she cried, interrupting herself, "that's a quarter to ten striking at the Val-de-Grace, ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... either of goat or sheep. I never see anybody who deserves go straight to heaven or who deserves to go straight to hell. When the judgment day comes it will be a difficult task. Why, Pauline, my dear, I am a humbug myself." ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... day I'll suddenly discover that He does exist. In that case, Mr. Savva, I thank you, but I'd rather not. Why should I? I live a nice, quiet existence. Of course, it's all a humbug, an imposition. But what business is it of mine? The people want to believe—let them. It wasn't ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... to read the various epithets, which they apply to him; The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man! The All-sided One! The Representative of Poetry upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme, and hurl at him the fierce names of Old Humbug! and Old ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... You think he's going, to guess that snake's riddles. Rot! Stuff and nonsense! Humbug! Get ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller
... thing that there's fower places staunin' in Millar's Level," said Jamie Lauder, "an' I'm telt there's five or six staunin' in the Black Horse Dook. It's a' a bit of humbug, an' I think we should try an' put an ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... humbug, Umbezi, "Eater-up-of-Elephants," parted for a while, and never did I know him in a more chastened frame of mind, except once, ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... humbug of sex superiority because she had seen it fall on its face to howl over a trodden worm, with the result that it discovered itself hollow ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... poet—against all the world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by Warton and carried on at this day by the new school of critics and scribblers, who think themselves poets because they do not write like Pope. I have no patience with such cursed humbug and bad taste; your whole generation are not worth a Canto of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man, or the Dunciad, or 'any thing that is his.'—But it is three in the matin, and I must go to bed. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... my teeth and tail! I thought you were a humbug! Why did you want to get fat? There's no truth to be got out of you but by cross-questioning. You ain't fit to be ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... humbug yourself. You like her. You care for her very much. You are thrilling at this very moment with the remembrance of her lips to-night. Think of what life will be with her—life full of all that is sweet and fair—love and riches, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... burn; to slay children and debauch women. To set up a pretext that such monsters are entitled to the grace and consideration of the most humane laws, is to beggar commonsense and yap intolerable humbug. Yet British self-respect was such, Mr Bennett to the contrary notwithstanding, that the dervishes were treated as men, and not ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... fools and gibbeting knaves. And after making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste which separate us from our fathers in every region of art—and even admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality, snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays—we are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some passages in them it might be ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... moidores that were in bank, when I wanted them. Egad, he changed his note when I told him what my life had been, and only wanted to pay me my cash and get rid of me. I never saw so terrified a visage. I burst out a-laughing in his face, told him it was all a humbug, and that the moidores were all his own, henceforth and for ever, and so ran off. I caused one of our people send him a bag of tea and a keg of brandy, before I left—poor Jack! I think you are the second person these ten years, that has cared a ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... the fellow, for an impudent, swindling, sneaking French humbug!—Your tone instantly changes, and you tell him to go about his business: but at twelve o'clock at night, when the voyage is over, and the custom-house business done, knowing not whither to go, with a wife and fourteen exhausted children, scarce able ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Marlborough of our tale made one of the safe investments of that day, he bought a Times and Punch; the latter full of steel-pen thrusts and woodcuts. Valor and beauty deigned to laugh at some inflamed humbug or other punctured by Punch. Now laughing together thaws our human ice; long before Swindon it was a talking match—at Swindon who so devoted as Captain Dolignan?—he handed them out—he souped them—he tough-chickened ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... panic when some accident has thrown them out of their reckoning. Fright unsettles the judgment: the oppressive silence of the woods is a vacuum in which the mind goes astray. It's a hollow sham, this pantheism, I said; being "one with Nature" is all humbug: I should like to see somebody. Man, to be sure, is of very little account, and soon gets beyond his depth; but the society of the least human being is better than this gigantic indifference. The "rapture on the lonely shore" is agreeable only when you know ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... well, and perfectly harmless such crazes are so long as the victims confine their beliefs to spirit-rapping, table-turning, and humbug of that sort; but when their convictions lead them to commit actions which compromise serious interests, and when, as in this case, there is a possibility of life itself being in danger, it is time they ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... easy plain sailing business that it is commonly supposed to be: it is hard work—harder than any but a growing boy can understand; it requires attention, and you are not strong enough to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too. Besides, Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are; the nice people whom you delight in either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon as they could; they never turned to the classics after they were no longer forced ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "This man is a humbug," was the next sentence the first lieutenant wrote, but he passed it to the captain. Christy wrote under it: "Tell him that we are perfectly satisfied with his replies, and thank him for his attendance;" which was done at once, and ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of his being ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... one lofty aspiration. These people, in their daily life were like squirrels in a cage, and because they moved, they thought they were progressing. In them scepticism had killed belief; religion, family, country, were, as they phrased it, all humbug. They had only one aim, one passion—to enjoy themselves. Their watchword was "pleasure." All those who did not perish of consumption would ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... found you out. You are not a bit solemn, really, only you put on the airs of a sister of mercy. So you don't like Etta; you need not be afraid of telling me so; she is the greatest humbug in the world, only Giles is so foolish as to believe in her. I call her a humbug because she pretends to be what she is not; she is really a most prosaic sort of person, and she wants to make people believe that she is a ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... help yourself. The Medical Record shows that out of one hundred cases like yours, one per cent invariably recovers. I've treated ninety-nine cases, and every one of them died. Why, man alive, you can't die if you try! There's no humbug ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... composite characters: he had much good and much cleverness in him; but he was absurd, and he afforded a subject of conversation to the two friends as they proceeded on their walk. "I wish there was less of fudge and humbug everywhere," said Sheffield; "one might shovel off cartloads from this place, and ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... whose orthodox toes Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup. Dr. Humdrum, whose eloquence flows, Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup; Dr. Rosygill puffing and fanning, And wiping away perspiration; Dr. Humbug, who proved Mr. Canning The beast in St. ...
— English Satires • Various
... best get out of this, you prayer-snuffling old humbug," he said savagely, "for if you stop much longer I will make you sing another tune. We have sea-cow whips here, too, and you shall learn what a hiding means, such a hiding that your own family won't know you, if you live to get back to them. Look ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... talk humbug. I'd like to see you following goodness when beauty is gone. I've known lots of plain old maids that were perfect saints and angels; and yet men crowded and jostled by them to get the pretty sinners. I dare say now," she added, with a bewitching look ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... topsy-turvy old humbug," cried Tom wrathfully. "Think I don't know you?" and he ran on, and caught up to his uncle as he was passing through the ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... the Senate, to speak modestly, as I look at it, with all due respect to the great men who met here to consider this matter, who deliberated for many days, and presented this as the result of their deliberations, is a cheat, a deception, a humbug—nothing that any State can take as a final settlement of the questions that are now giving trouble to this country, nothing that can settle permanently those difficulties. We must have something more definite, something more ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... excessively that any change would be a relief to him." ... "Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him." ... "Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, 'What fun it is living in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug?'" From henceforth his position among his friends was that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action. They were ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... the villagers thought it had "burst," others that it had "burned out." Betsy said: "Whatever it was, it was a humbug;" and the wisest man in Whitefield could neither tell whence it came nor whither it went. One thing, however, was certain: Farmer Lathem said that never, since his orchard began to bear, had he gathered such a crop of apples as he did, despite the drought, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... morning. In the Figaro an article from that old humbug Villemessant. He calls upon his fellow-citizens in Paris to resist ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... possibly feel anything else," I retorted, laughing. "You little humbug, to pretend you are old!" and slipping my arm round her waist, for we had always been dear friends, I walked off to chat with her in ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... horse worth forty rubles for nothing, just out of kindness; it seemed impossible. Had he been drunk one might understand it! He might have wished to show off. But the cadet had been sober, and therefore must have wished to bribe him to do something wrong. 'Eh, humbug!' thought Lukashka. 'Haven't I got the horse and we'll see later on. I'm not a fool myself and we shall see who'll get the better of the other,' he thought, feeling the necessity of being on his ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... of financial carrion that is exposed for sale in the market, are of the utmost benefit to the public. The bear is then a benefactor to the community, and when he pulls down and tears to pieces the rotten carcass of some gigantic humbug, strewing the highway with its remains, we cannot praise his ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... marks: He was awed by "the grandeur of the mountains". "A humbug". "Fetch". "Stonewall" Jackson. He was a ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... it very well; nor of how we sat talking, Fenn like an old, faithful, affectionate dependant, and I—well! I myself fallen into a mere admiration of so much impudence, that transcended words, and had very soon conquered animosity. I took a fancy to the man, he was so vast a humbug. I began to see a kind of beauty in him, his aplomb was so majestic. I never knew a rogue to cut so fat; his villainy was ample, like his belly, and I could scarce find it in my heart to hold him responsible for either. He was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pulpy hand, loaded with ostentatious rings, and grasping Dicker's recoiling fingers. "Harness up your little bill as quick as you can, and drive it like Jehu. Fastburg to be the only capital. Slowburg no claims at all, historical, geographical, or economic. The old arrangement a humbug; as inconvenient as a fifth wheel of a coach; costs the State thousands of greenbacks every year. Figure it all up statistically and dab it over with your shiniest rhetoric and make a big thing of it every way. That's what you've got to do; that's your ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Nathan rather sharply, to discover any mischief which might lurk in his expression. Perceiving that he looked perfectly sincere, and was innocent of any intention to quiz him, he merely uttered, in the most contemptuous tone, the single word "Humbug!" ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... b'leeve yar a humbug, but if that ole thing does run, and, mind, I tell yer, I don't b'leeve it will, do yer know what I'm goin' ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... the people is supreme, then away with your high and life-long judges, or at least let them be elected by the people and for very brief terms. Let grand juries be voted a humbug, and trial by jury a nuisance. Let electoral colleges be abolished as meaningless and cumbersome anomalies. Let the President be the direct representative of a mighty people, and act without let or hindrance—only let him ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Frankly, the Green family exasperate me," declared Mrs. Fielding. "I can put up with Jack. He's such a smart, good-looking boy, and he can drive like the devil. But I've no use for the other two, and never shall have. I think Green's a humbug. Is he going to join your picnic-party on ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... by a joint resolution of Congress, the use of "that first-class humbug and fraud, the whiskey meter," has been abolished. Now there are dozens of members of Congress who are not only "first-class humbugs and frauds," but whiskey meters, to whom whiskey is both meat and drink, and yet who ever heard of their proposing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... light and fine is the touch by which the painter evokes the small familiar Venetian realities (he has handled them with a vigor altogether peculiar in various other studies which I have not space to enumerate), and keeps the whole thing free from that element of humbug which has ever attended most attempts to reproduce the idiosyncrasies of Italy. I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks without having mentioned a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field of portraiture with which Mr. Sargent's name is preponderantly associated. I jumped ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... I think you'll take my views. Of course it's the very last thing I ever imagined myself doing; but I begin to see that the talk about fate isn't altogether humbug. I want this girl for my wife, and I never met any one else whom I really did want. She suits me exactly. It isn't as if I thought of marrying an ordinary, ignorant, low-class girl. Eve—that's her name—is very much out of the common, look at her how you may. She's rather melancholy, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... it all too, solemnly staking the lives of his children on his veracity! I stared at him in amazement, not knowing what to make of it: one moment I thought he must be out of his mind; the next I concluded he had been a humbug all along, an ape in a lion's skin. Oh, it ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... Percy. "Of course you're bound to make out it's all humbug, but I know better. Come, don't be in a rage, Raby; ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... newspapers; who himself had been the chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller, camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, detache-attache, pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer, guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual gendelettre, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted, and signed with so great a name, did not ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... At last he gathered up the bridle, and started up the most direct way. The mule did not like it at all, evidently, and expressed his disgust by occasionally stopping short and snuffing, meaning probably to intimate that he considered the whole thing a humbug, and that in his opinion we should all slump through together, and go to—nobody knows where. At last, when we were almost up the ascent, he did slump, and went up to his breast in the snow; whereat the guide pulled ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Patriarch—who had floated serenely through the Yard in the forenoon before the harrying began, with the express design of getting up this trustfulness in his shining bumps and silken locks—at which identical hour and minute, that first-rate humbug of a thousand guns was heavily floundering in the little Dock of his exhausted Tug at home, and was saying, as ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... takee up anysing that Missee want,' said the Chinaman gallantly. 'Ah Moy velly, velly fond of Missee. He no come to Slunday-school at all if teacher no come too! Slunday-school is a great big bluff most allee time—it seem to me. Humbug, eh?' ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... as well as you do that he has no idea of doing anything of the kind, and you need not tell me pretty tales that you don't believe yourself. Sister, it is all humbug; 'Bunnie' is dead, and I sha'n't waste another prayer on St. Francis! If ever I get another rabbit, it will be when I buy one, as I mean to do just as soon as I move to some nice place where owls ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... not to stop half way, but to set right, as far as she can, whatever she has done wrong—not for the honour of her family, not for her own fame, not for any of those considerations which unfortunate circumstances have induced her to regard as hollow, and in point of fact, as approaching to humbug—but because it is wrong, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... humbug. I am not in a humour now to stand picking my words. I have been infernally badly ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... nice straightforward chaps, with long noses drawn down in a line from their foreheads, like you see in the British Museum. That fellow looks as if he wouldn't be long in England before he'd be looking at a judge and jury, and then be sent off to penal servitude. Greek statues are humbug. They don't do ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... here twenty-four hours," he said. "I have looked you up at the first opportunity. Now am I a nuisance? Be frank! I told the servant that if you were at work you weren't to be disturbed. Don't humbug about it; if I am in ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... quite sincere. The common libertine, like the drunkard, succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar and a humbug, pretending to be better than the detected libertines, and clamoring for their condign punishment; but this is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... exceptionally graphic description of a lagoon on the top of one of the highest peaks of Hinchinbrook Island, in which all manner of sea fish revelled. When doubt was expressed as to the possibility of sea-water and sea-fish getting up so far "on top" and it was suggested—"What you think, that old man humbug you?" "Yes," was the ready response; "me think that old fella no tell true. Him humbug." Some blacks possess ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... language, as we have seen, is not strength; but if there is real strength in the criticism, and it is proportionate and appropriate, it will effect its purpose. It will free the genius, or it will crush the humbug. A good critic ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... word for the truth of what he asserted, I had nothing to do but to trundle with my men into our boats, and pull back to the frigate. Hemming approved of what I had done, though he agreed with me that it was all humbug, and that the Spanish captain pretended to have captured the brig for the sake of saving her from our claws. He determined therefore to watch the two vessels, and we accordingly hove-to to see what they ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... the squire, "but as for that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Beer,—it's Candor!' said Abel. 'It's your own proposal, Hollins. Suppose it's evil to swear: isn't it better I should express it, and be done with it, than keep it bottled up, to ferment in my mind? Oh, you're a precious, consistent old humbug, you are!' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... nonsense Received with cordial sympathy With the most obvious sincerity Held forth with fluency and zest Gracious solicitude Punctiliously civil and polite An air of sphinx-like mystery Consumed by zeal Awaited with lively interest Sledge-hammer blows against humbug This recalls a happy retort Preeminently a case in point Exquisite precision and finish Incomparably better informed A keen eye for incongruities Polite to the point of deference To the last degree improbable People with rampant prejudices A model of chivalrous propriety By ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... do. Thought you'd have three of them, did you? Or perhaps you only wanted me for your decoy? Why don't you kiss him now, when he can know it? But he's a beauty to take care of you for somebody else. Fighting for the other one, eh? Stuff and humbug! Take him home, and the curse of Judas on ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... seen what a horrid grimace he made, and how he lifted up both his hands, as if to wave off an imaginary cup of tea! I always thought that the tea sent over to this country from China was a miserable humbug; so poor Min-Yung's horror at being asked to drink a cup of it, quite upset me, and I laughed immoderately. Min-Yung laughed, too; and understood by the way I shook my fore-finger at him, just as well as if I had said, ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... certain exclusive people. His conscience did not escape without some qualms; he did not like to be labeled what he was not. But he had learned by this time that society of every grade is in great part a game of Mild Humbug, and that this game, like all others, must be played according to rule. Each player has a right to make the most of his hand, whatever it may be. He had begun without a single strong card. Neither great wealth, personal distinction, ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... Different? Why, there were fifty Jennys. But the shrewd, romantic, honest, true Jenny was behind them all, not stupid, not sentimental, bold as a lion, destructively experienced in hardship and endurance, very quick indeed to single out and wither humbug that was within her range of knowledge, but innocent as a child before any other sort of humbug whatsoever. That was why she could now sneer at the stage-heroine, and could play with the mysterious beauties of her own reflection; but it was why ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... out on the familiar grey and dull sky, he could see no hope whatever for the future of his country. Irish life appeared to him one vast mistake; and so far as he had any plans for the future they were of a life removed from the chaos and fret and toil and moil and disappointments and humbug of politics. He thought of returning once more to his profession; but he resolved that it would be neither amid the incessant decay of Ireland, nor surrounded by hostile faces and unsympathetic hearts in England. His thoughts were ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... was near quarter-day, managed to get taken on at a furniture warehouse. He moved people from the suburbs to London, from London to the suburbs, from one suburb to another. His companions were hurried and querulous. In particular, he loathed the foreman, a pious humbug who allowed no swearing, but indulged in something far more degraded—the Cockney repartee. The London intellect, so pert and shallow, like a stream that never reaches the ocean, disgusted him almost as much as the London physique, which for all its dexterity ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... or impose; also to steal.—Cant. —Biting was once esteemed a kind of wit, similar to the humbug. An instance of it is given in the Spectator: A man under sentence of death having sold his body to a surgeon rather below the market price, on receiving the money, cried, A bite! I am to be hanged in chains.—To bite the roger; to steal a portmanteau. To bite the wiper, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... aphorisms which constitute the stock-in-trade of all religious cheap-jacks, the bribe of future life, the sacerdotal tinge with its complement of mendacity, the secrecy of doctrine, the pretentiously-mysterious self-retirement, the "sacred quaternion," the bean-humbug . . . ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... is "unethical" among dentists as among physicians. Humbug and imposition are supposed to go inevitably with self-advertising by the methods used in selling shoes or automobiles. Therefore such advertising is prohibited. But what seems to be forgotten in this definition ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... spell of idleness in Tunisian waters, had degenerated into a farce in which the ridiculous part fell to our share. So that when I took over the command of the squadron, with the prospect of seeing it undergo the same course of humbug again, I could not resist making some representations on the subject to M. Guizot, a resolute and large-minded man, as solicitous for his country's honour as for his own. That very year, as it happened, the Bey of Tunis had had to complain ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Hester so for worlds, that the fact that she goes on living comfortably in the country after bringing out that book makes thoughtful people, not me, of course, but other earnest-minded people, think she is a humbug." ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... her countrywomen received particularly severe treatment at her hands. Sanin was more than once set laughing by some bold and well-directed word. Above all, Maria Nikolaevna had no patience with hypocrisy, cant, and humbug. She discovered it almost everywhere. She, as it were, plumed herself on and boasted of the humble surroundings in which she had begun life. She told rather queer anecdotes of her relations in the days of her childhood, spoke of herself as quite ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... before I was fairly awake thrust my head into a saucer of milk. Of course I would not eat. Then he tried to make me climb; but I was so bewildered that I drew in my head and shut up my shell. My master went out, saying, "Mr. Wood is a humbug, anyway." I waited till all was quiet, then I took a survey of the room. I began to feel hungry, as you may imagine, for I had eaten nothing since the first of November; so I crawled over to the saucer of milk, and ...
— Harper's Young People, May 4, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ev'ry degree, In livery or out of it, listen to me! See what comes of lying!—don't join in the league To humbug your master or ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... There is but one hope for you, unless you would go sorrowful. To come back to your godmamma, who will teach you how to walk and be happy—happy and get all you want. Also, since she is now poor, you would do well to send her a little money to this address in Italy, since that old humbug of a Pasteur, whom she cannot harm because of the influences round him, still prevents her from returning to Switzerland, where she has friends. Now that big plum, it is very nice and you desire it much. Come to your godmamma and ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... crazy? Do you suppose I would want to humbug Mr. Manders? No, no—Mr. Manders has always been too kind a friend for me to do that. But what I wanted to talk to you about, was my going ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... Holmes met some cordial greeting at every turn. What a just, clever fellow he was! people said: one of those men improved by success: just to the defrauding of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very lowest: hadn't one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy, he was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but success had improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... bamboozle the public into buying what neither he nor the public really cares for. If he does his best he may feel that he is as fairly earning his livelihood as his fellow workmen, the blacksmith and the stonecutter, and is as little dependent as they upon either charity or humbug. The best that government has done for art in France is the commissioning of the great decorative paintings of Baudry and Puvis. In this country, also, governments, national, State, or municipal, are patronizing art in the ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... was not, I hasten to add, that I too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the spring; for how else should I have come by the whole undimmed sense of the connection?—the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether I mightn't ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... and artistic shapes in which it is practised by the modern Persian. He delights in stripping bare the sham piety of the austere Mohammedan, the gullibility of the pilgrims to the sacred shrines, the sanctimonious humbug of the lantern-jawed devotees of Kum. One of his best portraits is that of the wandering dervish, who befriends and instructs, and ultimately robs Hajji Baba, and who thus explains the secrets ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... I loved her, I was entirely hers; I never thought of the future, and everything, my whole life, I shared with her ... now this passion has died out in me.... Well, you would tell me to be a humbug, to play at being in love, wouldn't you? But what for? from pity for her? If she's a decent girl, she won't care for such charity herself, but if she is glad to be consoled by my ... my sympathy, well, she's ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... lesson of moderation. "You have failed, my very able chief," he said to himself, "because you have never believed intensely enough to move you to act. You have attached too much importance to the adulteration—the folly and the humbug. And here you are, still only a critic, destructive ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... of the city was present in his carriage among the expectant crowd. The clock struck the hour of noon, but the little Delaware skiff was nowhere to be seen; and, as the sun declined from the zenith, the people gradually dispersed, muttering, "Another humbug!" ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... easily roused; and, followed by the others, he ran to the crag and shouted, "Give us none of your humbug! Bring back the boat, or it will be the worse ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... about his divided house, and begged me to restore a family its happiness. He was very polite and very smiling for the matter of that. Then I answered to the effect that I wanted nothing better, and I undertook to reconcile the count and his wife. You know it's not humbug. I should be delighted to see them all happy again, the poor things! Besides, it would be a relief to me for there are days—yes, there are days—when he ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... deal o' humbug i' this world," Sarah sed, when th' woman wor gooan, "awm glad he's getten catched at last, aw mak nowt o' sich decaitful fowk, robbin' poor people o' ther brass,—it's little enuff 'at we can finger honestly nah ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... way of treating men. It's the man's view that's represented, you see. Think of a railway train: fifteen carriages for men who want to smoke. Doesn't it make your blood boil? If I were a woman I'd blow some one's brains out. Don't you laugh at us a great deal? Don't you think it all a great humbug? You, I mean—how does it all ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... man, I believe I should have given you a broken head for your pains. But you are so damnably courteous, as well as such an unutterable fool!" He broke off with a hard laugh and a savage kick at the coals in front of him. "I couldn't see myself doing it," he said, "humbug as you are." ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... gave me a hint that, on arriving at Tripoli, there would be exhibited a good deal of fantazia, ("humbug[10]") by the health-office department. Accordingly, after we had been an hour in port, the health officer came alongside, and affected great surprise at our not having passports, and asked me, with great pomposity, what was my "reverito nome?" The Turks always adopt and caricature the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... after all. How could he know that old Slade would prove a rogue and a humbug; it would have been wiser to wait a little, but then human nature is liable to make mistakes, and in spite of it all, they had been so happy. Olive was such a splendid companion, she had brains as ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... man, of quick and precise movements, sardonic countenance; and one look from his sharp round set of eyes, tells you at once that you must not trifle with him. Of a temper that must have cost him some pains to keep under control, he hates humbug and all sort of yabber-yabber. His round head of tolerable size, is of German mould, for the earnestness of his forehead is corrected by the fullness of his cheeks, and a set of moustachios is the padlock of his mouth, whose key is kept safe in his head, and his heart ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... attache used to dine with me, and we agreed that our respective countries were guilty. If the Powers wished, they could establish order easily. No Power wanted order. Each was seeking its own interests. Never has there been more hypocritical humbug talked by both great and small Powers than over Macedonia. They handed moral letters about law and order to the Turk with one hand, and with the other distributed revolutionary funds to effectually prevent ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... little three-year-old, who inhabits about my camp in the Caliente, he addresses as 'Prince Hal.' The fool of a white steer that's worshippin' about 'Falstaff' gets named 'Pistol,' although thar's mighty little about the weak-kneed humbug to remind you of anythin' as vehement as a gun. Falstaff, Pistol, Hotspur an' Prince Hal; them's the titles this dramatist confers ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of humbug in Japan that nobody in the whole household, including the students who respected nothing, ever allowed themselves the relief of smiling at the sacred hour of study, even when ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... attacks humbug, when a private soldier takes the square cap off a first president, and throws it out of ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... "Oh, humbug," said Mr. Stacy; "that is putting it too strong, Harriet—as if I couldn't pay money or ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... "It's all humbug. They run this concern to make money, and they want some of ours. Mr. Marigold'll be sent right back with ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... Handbook is a Handbook after all, a very useful thing, but still—the fact is that we live in an age of humbug, in which everything, to obtain note and reputation, must depend less upon its own intrinsic merit than on the name it bears. The present book is about one of the best books ever written upon Spain; but we are afraid that it will never be estimated at its proper value; ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... to Mrs. Thrale, without even mentioning the existence of this mob; perhaps at this very moment he thinks it "a humbug upon the nation," as ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... whole, the Count de St. Germain was a man of magnificent attainments, but the use he made of his talents proved him to be also a most magnificent humbug. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... resumed the visiter—"as I was observing a little while ago, there are some very outre notions in that book of yours Monsieur Bon-Bon. What, for instance, do you mean by all that humbug about the soul? Pray, sir, what is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... biscuit from beside the day's accumulations of papers upon his heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor, examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of essential fact—quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,— but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains of building-up ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... would appear or exist. Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition of character,—every act of munificence and of baseness,—every narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,—every instance and example of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,—every religious, social, and political excitement,—every panic,—and every accident even, from carelessness or want of skill,—each and all these have their exact parallels, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... with an air of Christian resignation, and looked up at the panels of the coffered ceiling. "In that," he answered, "I may honestly say, I can't help you. Humbug apart, I have not known Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman's address—or Maisie's either—ever since my poor friend's death. Prudent woman, Mrs. Yorke-Bannerman! She went away, I believe, to somewhere in North Wales, and afterwards to Brittany. But ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen |
