"Levity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fancies to the full. It is, however, more probable that the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging parsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved in debt. Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the score of a certain levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured that even during the brief space of their union she had proved a faithless wife. Yet she contrived to keep Francesco's confidence, and it is certain that her family profited by their connection with the Peretti. Of her six brothers, Mario, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... death-blow to superstition, but left religion out in the cold. The general, the great offence Carlyle charges Voltaire with is, that "he intermeddled in religion without being himself in any measure religious; that he entered the Temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding, beyond the mere superficies, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... insolent, flippant, dissolute youth: aping the man of intrigue and levity: over-dressed, over-confident, inordinately vain of his personal appearance: distinguished as to his hair, cane, snuff-box, and singing-voice: and unhappily the son of a working shoemaker. Bent on loftier flights than such ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... and shewed a deep interest in everything I saw. The good advocate arrived, and was surprised at the change in my appearance. He launched out in his usual jokes, and I followed him on that ground, yet I was careful not to give to my conversation the tone of levity which used to cause so much mirth in our travelling coach; so that, to, pay me a compliment, he told nee that, if I had had the sign of manhood shaved from my face, I had certainly transferred it to my mind. Donna Lucrezia ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... who will justly earn the enormous salaries that are at present being paid to inadequate aliens for road sweepings, and all will be well. At the same time the lawlessness ingrained by governors among the governed during the last thirty, forty, or it may be fifty years; the brutal levity of the public conscience in regard to public duty; the toughening and suppling of public morals, and the reckless disregard for human life, bred by impotent laws and fostered by familiarity with needless accidents and criminal neglect, will miraculously ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... mood in which he fashioned them. He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures of Baron Munchausen. They were to be taken, like one of Dr. Marigold's prescriptions, with a grain of salt. The idea of blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German influence, was very popular in England and France at this period. Balzac's L'Auberge Rouge and L'Elixir de la Longue Vie are ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... said, "Well, I resign myself to your levity. And after all, it doesn't much matter, for no one now ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... here he comes, with his odious creaking shoes. What man can ever expect to be loved who wears creaking shoes?" pursued her ladyship, as Lord Delacour entered the room, his shoes creaking at every step; and assuming an air of levity, she welcomed him as a stranger to her dressing-room. "No speeches, my lord! no speeches, I beseech you," cried she, as he was beginning to speak to Miss Portman. "Believe me, that explanations always make bad worse. Miss Portman is here, thank Heaven! and her; and Champfort ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... brought together, because they both seem subject to the objection of too much levity for the solemnity of enchantment, and may both be shewn, by one quotation from Camden's account of Ireland, to be founded upon a practice really observed by the uncivilised natives of that country: "When any one ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mean, Guy?" said Agnes, quite shocked at his levity. The whole party set up a laugh in which the driver heartily joined, knowing what had ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... for an exuberance of which Lincoln's Inn Fields had not yet cured him. There was an airy disregard for legal formalities about him which exasperated his father, an attorney of the old school. He came to the point, directly Bill entered the room, with a speed and levity that would have appalled Nichols Senior, and must have caused the other two Nicholses to ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Or a poor criminal led in terror and shame to the scaffold. All the town has been out to gaze at the sorrowing exiles, None of them bearing in mind that a like misfortune hereafter, Possibly almost directly, may happen to be their own portion. I can't pardon such levity; yet 'tis the nature of all men." Thereupon rejoin'd the noble and excellent pastor, He, the charm of the town, in age scarce more than a stripling:— (He was acquainted with life, and knew the wants of his ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... had lost patience with her levity. "Give it away—just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter—to some cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender's power of sound and his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the Thingumbob, ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... liberal tip—to play The Star-Spangled Banner, and there was a case of Doppelkinn's sparkling Moselle. I may as well state right here that we neither heard our national anthem nor drank the vintage. You will soon learn why. I can laugh now, I can treat the whole affair with becoming levity, but at the time I ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... be gained," she said severely, "by speaking with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Marian, two cousins of the Faulkners, who were always ready for anything, and a Miss Mordaunt, were reckoned up, and their dresses quickly discussed; but all the time Marian said not a word. She was thinking of the waste of time and consideration, the folly, levity and vanity, the throwing away of money, all this would occasion, and enjoying in her own mind the pleasure of resisting it in toto. She supposed she must go to the archery meeting, though why people could ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. Everything seems out of nature in this chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... had power been more centralized, and never in France had the reins been held by persons so pitiful, impelled by motives so contemptible. The levity, vanity, and spite of a concubine became a mighty engine to influence the destinies of nations. Louis XV., enervated by pleasures and devoured by ennui, still had his emotions; he shared Pompadour's detestation of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... army, and it is on record that the first message flashed through from the south was a question about the number of a horse. With inconceivable stupidity this has been cited as an example of military levity and incapacity. Of course the object of the question was a test as to whether they were really in communication with the garrison. It must be confessed that the town seems to have contained some ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... method of attacking Christianity has always approved itself to French Freethinkers. They regard the statement that he treated religious questions in a spirit of levity as the weak defence of those who know that irony and sarcasm are the deadliest enemies of their faith. Superstition dislikes argument, but it hates laughter. Nimble and far-flashing wit is more potent against error than the slow dull logic of the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... decision to deal with a case of incest. The Corinthians had treated this gross offence almost with levity, but St. Paul declares that the offender shall be excommunicated and shall be punished by disease (v. 1-8). After explaining some advice of his earlier letter (v. 9-13), he goes on to rebuke a third abuse—litigation ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... at Koenigsberg, and France would have carried her frontier eastward to the Rhine, dismembering Germany. Such, I doubt not, would have been the attempt. The conception is entirely worthy of that Imperial levity with which the war began. But the madcap menace of the French Empire cannot be the measure of German justice. It is for Germany to show, that, notwithstanding this wildness, she knows how to be just. Dismemberment on this account would be only ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... privilege and his peculiarly enviable happiness; such a person, who believes that on the slightest impulse, he can actualize all sorts of curves and angles, who knows the sensation of a certain divine levity, an "upwards" without effort or constraint, a "downwards" without descending or lowering—without TROUBLE!—how could the man with such dream-experiences and dream-habits fail to find "happiness" differently coloured and defined, even in his waking ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... apartment with the cry of 'Misericordia!' The foreigner from the north of Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movement of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ear the subterranean sounds which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives: but, as soon as his wish is gratified, he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... levity lead a man to lewdness; but tradition is a fence to the law, tithes are a fence to riches, vows are a fence to abstinence, while the fence of wisdom ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... had reached its apogee, and was on the wane. The Puritan had stretched his austereness to the point of levity; the Dutchman had comfortably sweated his obedience and content; the Cavalier had paced it with a pretty air of patronage and an eye for matron and maid; the Indian, come from his far hunting-grounds, bivouacked in the governor's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... George II. in 1745, during the rebellion in Scotland. In the midst of the storm by which he was assailed, Lord North acknowledged himself the adviser of this measure, and treated the opposition with much levity,—but he was obliged to yield to the representations of some of his friends, and to state in conclusion, that though he still considered he was right, yet as other gentlemen, for whom he had ever had the greatest deference, seemed to be of another opinion, he had no objection, notwithstanding ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of all discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in things, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and unintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own value. AEsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution to the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of that experience on which they reflect with ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Yet another circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with the actualities of sport, war, or comradeship: and here and there his note is false in these matters, and reminds one (though very remotely) of the mere provincial bully that ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a little. "Excuse my levity," said he, "but inventors—and I am one of them, you know—always claim that they are about to revolutionize the world of industry. I never knew one of them to claim less than that for a patent flytrap or an improved sausage stuffer. Mr. Minford ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... upright young man. Himself of the most scrupulous gravity and good breeding, in his communication with other folks he appeared to exact, or, at any rate, to occasion, the same behaviour. His nature was above levity and jokes: they seemed out of place when addressed to him. He was slow of comprehending them: and they slunk as it were abashed out of his society. "He always seemed great to me," says Harry Warrington, in one of his letters many years after the date of which we are writing; "and I never thought ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not all the Irish, even of the wretchedly poor, are thus unskilled and helpless, but a deplorably large class is; and it is this class whose awkwardness and utter ignorance are too often made the theme of unthinking levity and ridicule when the poor exile from home and kindled lands in New York and undertakes housework or anything else for a living. The "awkwardness," which means only inability to do what one has never even seen done, is not confined to any class ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... head-dresses where the driven sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? You see it everywhere—enormous idols they seem, with faces and eyes and lips awfully like the sphinx—well, that's the nearest I can get to it." He puffed his pipe hard. But there was no sign of levity in him. He told the actual truth as far as in him lay, yet half ashamed of what he told. And a good deal he ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... the centre of the movement and compel the system to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... cried Yates, and there was a certain impressiveness in his voice in spite of his former levity; "this farce has gone just as far as it is going. Go inside the tent, there, and in my coat pocket you will find a telegram, the first of a dozen or two received by me within the last twenty-four hours. Then you will see whom you propose ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... the whole scene from beginning to end. The situation of Ossaroo would have bean sufficiently ludicrous for Caspar to have laughed at it, but for the danger in which the shikaree was placed. This was so evident, that instead of indulging in anything akin to levity, Caspar looked on with feelings of deep anxiety, Karl being equally apprehensive about the result. Neither could do anything to aid or rescue him, as they were unarmed—both having dropped their ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... in anger as a thought struck him, and the steady gray eyes bored into the unflinching black ones as he continued, with no trace of his former levity in his voice: ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... grave the earth, coolly criticises the Universe, settles law, and measures his puny stature against that awful Unknown Force, deeply hidden, but majestically existent, which for want of ampler designation we call GOD—God, whom some of us will scarcely recognize, save with the mixture of doubt, levity, and general reluctance; God, whom we never obey unless obedience is enforced by calamity; God, whom we never truly love, because so many of us prefer to stake our chances of the future on ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... smile curved the red lips—a smile that hinted of craft rather than levity. "I wonder what's worrying him most, ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... predecessor. The memory of the great Constantine, whom the British legions had given to the church and to the empire, suggested the singular motive of their third choice. They discovered in the ranks a private soldier of the name of Constantine, and their impetuous levity had already seated him on the throne, before they perceived his incapacity to sustain the weight of that glorious appellation. [96] Yet the authority of Constantine was less precarious, and his government was more successful, than the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... little creature and truly pious. She had married me in the full confidence that my levity was merely put on, and would at once give way before the influence she hoped to exert upon my mind. Poor little thing! she deceived herself. I allowed her, indeed, to do entirely as she pleased; but for myself, I carried my infidelity ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... again; and he reminded me of my promise, which I endeavoured to evade with affected pleasantry, upon which he manifested the utmost displeasure and chagrin, shedding some crocodile tears, and upbraided me with levity and indifference. He observed, that he had solicited my favour for ten long months without intermission, and imagined I had held out so long on virtuous motives only; but now he could plainly perceive that his want of success had been owing to my want of affection, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... in spite of the humor of the situation and the levity of the ladies, there was a characteristic national practicalness about them, and the consul, with a sigh, at last gave the address of one or two responsible experts in genealogical inquiry, as he had often done before. He felt it was impossible to offer any advice to ladies as ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... of 1834 and the detestable shallowness of the present time. This prevailing frivolity and unscholarliness is something which the United is seeking to remedy, and we are thankful indeed for stories such as this, which expose modern levity in all its nauseousness. It is evident that Miss Sisson is emulating the appreciative Anne Carroll of 1834, rather than her obtuse and indifferent descendant. "The District School," by Edna R. Guilford, describes very ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and the ideas and wishes which she chiefly fostered, respected great national events, and changes not to be brought round without both hazard and bloodshed, and therefore not to be thought of with levity. Her manner, consequently, was grave, though she readily contributed her talents to the amusement of society, and stood very high in the opinion of the old Baron, who used to sing along with her such French duets of Lindor ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... marriage was celebrated, to the entire satisfaction of all parties. The Baron ordered the doors to be thrown open, and the house free for all comers; with every other token of joy and festivity. Edmund appeared full of joy without levity, of mirth without extravagance; he received the congratulations of his friends, with ease, freedom, and vivacity. He sent for his foster father and mother, who began to think themselves neglected, as he had been so deeply engaged in affairs of more consequence ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it is related of him that he would chew and swallow wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish fleet of fifty sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the REVENGE, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open - either to turn her back upon the enemy or ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the soul by this levity of my father's, and that he should speak with irreverence and jestingly about the most serious things; but a respectful son is not called upon to go further than I do in repressing his somewhat Voltairean freedom of speech. I say Voltairean, because I am not able to describe it by any other ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... trading with the Carolineans. Hitherto they despised the French, whom they called light as a feather, fickle as the wind, and deceitful as serpents; and, being naturally of a very grave cast, they considered the levity of that people as an unpardonable insult. They looked upon themselves as a great and powerful nation, and though their number was much diminished, yet they could bring from their different towns about three thousand men to the field. At this time they had neither arms nor ammunition ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... Clough, and Palgrave; Church and Temple, Lake and Stanley; Lord Coleridge, William Forster, and John Morley, he had equally warm regard, and, in some ways, sympathy. It was only when the sphere of conduct was approached that his judgment became severe and his sympathy dried up. In Politics—levity, time-serving, mob-pleasing, the spirit which prefers partisanship to patriotism, were the faults which he could not pardon. His imperfect sympathy with Mr. Gladstone, a deplorable but undeniable fact, was due not so much to ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... very obstinate, but justice set the responsibility down to her account, not to his; analysing her temperament, without excusing it, she found a spirit of adventure and experiment—or should she say of restlessness and levity?—which Marchmont did not minister to nor yet assuage. The only pleasure that lay in this discovery came from the fact that it was so opposed to the general idea about her. For it was her lot to be exalted into a type of the splendid ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... a serious, solemn business, and these men were not given to levity in any event. When they were seated, there was a moment of silence so tense it could be heard. Every chance movement of a foot on the uncarpeted floor sent an echo through ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... would not be half so interesting. Some men shall be fortunate and others shall not; everything has to balance in some way. I am necessary to one side of the scales, as a weight." He spoke with a levity he by no ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... within. Beauty is an excellent gift of God, but many a pretty girl is like the flower called 'the imperial crown,' which is admired for its showy appearance, and despised for its unpleasant odor. Were her mind as free from pride, selfishness, luxury, and levity, as her countenance is from spots and wrinkles, and could she govern her inward inclinations as she does her external carriage, she would have none to ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... his mettle. No levity, nothing of the jester, no trace of ennui lingered in his manner. The presence of the magnificent woman transfigured his body and called up all his social resources. His eye kindled its sparkling fires, his lip took a deeper glow of vital red. These manifestations ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... not altogether pleased by Pete's levity and her face showed it. She did not smile, but rearranged the things on the tray in a preoccupied manner, and asked him if there was anything ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... won't." She shook her head with an attempt at levity. "I've come all this distance, worried to death every moment over you, and now I'm going to stay until I'm sure that everything's all right. Besides, Barry," she moved close to him, "you'll need me. Won't you? Haven't I always been near you when you've ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... "How d'you do?" Nekhludoff sat down. He was about to censure Mariette in his mind for her levity when, noticing the serious and even slightly dissatisfied look in his eyes, she suddenly, to please him, changed not only the expression of her face, but also the attitude of her mind; for she felt the wish to please him as soon as she looked at him. She suddenly turned serious, dissatisfied ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... concerned with the judgment upon Montesquieu, nor with the truth as to contemporary English opinion about him, but a writer who devises an antithesis to such a man as Montesquieu in learned pigs and musical infants, deliberately condescends not merely to triviality or levity, but to flat vulgarity of thought, to something of mean and ignoble association. Though one of the most common, this is not Macaulay's only sin in the same unfortunate direction. He too frequently resorts ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... of reach without another word, leaving me to shudder alike at his levity and his peril; nor could I follow him very far by the wan light of the April stars; but I saw his forearms resting a moment in the spout that ran around the tower, between bricks and slates, on the level of the floor; and I had another ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... no less displeased at the exclusion given them in this election: the senior monks of Christ-Church were injured by the irregular proceedings of their juniors: the juniors themselves, ashamed of their conduct, and disgusted with the levity of Reginald, who had broken his engagements with them, were willing to set aside his election [d]: and all men concurred in the design of remedying the false measures which had been taken. But as John knew that this affair would be canvassed before a superior tribunal, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... and one feels now is the time to enjoy one's self, to kick up one's heels a little, while at least there is not likely to be much of a watch kept up there—the saints forgive me,' cried Jacques, trembling and crossing himself, 'if I speak with levity at such a moment! And the little ladies were very kind. It was wrong to close their chapel, M. le Maire. From that comes ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... his strongest bass. "Pardon me. I cannot accept such a view, sir. There is a levity abroad in our land which I must deplore. No matter how leniently you may try to put it, in the end we have the spectacle of a struggle between men where lying decides the survival of the fittest. Better, far better, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... your last answers it would appear that money seems sometimes capable of being treated with levity. Can you give me an instance when cash ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... regretfully forced into materialism by some mental confusion or obscurity, but he revels in it, and invites all to taste and see how gracious a philosophy it is. There is an ill-concealed levity and coarseness in his handling of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... and dropping the tone of levity which he had employed, he opened the letter Sam had forged, and suddenly handing it ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... may be said, that the great disease of France has been the disorder in its domestic relations. That amidst the general surrender of its upper classes in former times to levity, "and something more," there were many exceptions of family happiness and purity, is as certain as that human nature, in its worst state of depravity, will ever assert its better tendencies, and give indications of the ethereal source from which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... the Prince of Conti; an adorable woman, as well by her sweetness and the goodness of her charming character, as by her agreeable wit and incessant cheerfulness. Lastly, Madam Dupin, more beautiful than either of her sisters, and the only one who has not been reproached with some levity of conduct. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... really two weeks of peace unbroken, but I had begun to think that it might be better for me to stroll over and beg pardon for my levity when one bright morning Hawkins came chug-chugging up the drive in a huge, ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... that this day would find us separated by almost as great a distance as is possible on the surface of our globe! and that I should be anchored, as I now am, within two miles of a great city, doomed, I fear, to destruction, from the folly of its own rulers and the vanity and levity of ours. We have moved a little farther up the river this morning, and as we are, like St. Paul, dropping an anchor from the stern, I have had over my head for several hours the incessant dancing about and clanking of a ponderous chain-cable, till my brains ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... us very seriously," thought Mr. Cruger. Mrs. Cruger glanced at her husband and noticed a rather injured expression appear upon his face. Evidently he was not highly pleased at Helene's levity. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... bring to you frightful images of guilt, and the anguish of innocent love betrayed. Yet I who draw down all this misery upon you; I who cast you forth and remorselessly have set the seal of distrust and agony on the heart and brow of my own child, who with devilish levity have endeavoured to steal away her loveliness to place in its stead the foul deformity of sin; I, in the overflowing anguish of my heart, supplicate you ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... "so much the questionableness of the play; what shocked me most was the horrible levity of the audience, the laughter with which every indecent allusion ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... forced, hardly more than a slight, fixed twist of the lips, as if he strove to advertise his ability to laugh at danger. His customary dash, a pleasing levity of manner, was gone, giving place to a suggestion of strain, so that he seemed always on the alert against himself, determined to edit in advance his answer to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... from my father of King Lewis' treatment of his Huguenot subjects—of the Dragonnade, as it was called, and the sufferings of the poor people at the hands of the brutal soldiery—I, who knew of this, was shocked at the callous levity of the captain's speech; and I could have struck the fat, foolish face of the sergeant ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately simplified for most journalists ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... us who are grateful to Mr. Leacock as an intrepid purveyor of wholesome food for laughter have not failed to recognize that he mingles shrewdness with levity—that he is, in short, wise as well ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... just so. Count Rumford hence infers that no alteration of temperature can take place in a fluid, without an internal motion of its particles, and as this motion is produced only by the comparative levity of the heated particles, heat ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... about it in this light way—marriage is too sacred to be treated with levity," said Edith, in a tremulous tone. "But where is the mask?" she added, glancing anxiously toward the bed. "You know you said the face of the bride ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... stood by and seen the issue, the final result of it all. I believe, if only once the prospect of a promising life blasted on the outset by wild ways had passed close under his eyes, he never COULD have spoken with such levity of what led to its piteous destruction. Had I a brother yet living, I should tremble to let him read Thackeray's lecture on Fielding. I should hide it away from him. If, in spite of precaution, it should fall into his hands, I should earnestly pray him not to be ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... superior to Swinburne's "Chastelard" (not to speak of his interminable musical verbiage in "Bothwell") but it is paler, colder, and poetically inferior. The voluptuous warmth and wealth of color, the exquisite levity, the debonnaire grace of the Swinburnian drama we seek in vain. Bjoernson is vigorous, but he is not subtile. Mere feline amorousness, such as Swinburne so inimitably portrays, he would disdain to deal ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... repeating what he talks every Day of his Life; and, with the Ornaments of insignificant Laughs and Gestures, enforced his Arguments by Quotations out of Plays and Songs, which allude to the Perjuries of the Fair, and the general Levity of Women. Methought he strove to shine more than ordinarily in his Talkative Way, that he might insult my Silence, and distinguish himself before a Woman of Arietta's Taste and Understanding. She had often an Inclination to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to him any one temperament. He was neither sanguine, like Peter, nor choleric, like Paul, nor melancholy, like John, nor phlegmatic, as James is sometimes, though incorrectly, represented to have been; but he combined the vivacity without the levity of the sanguine, the vigor without the violence of the choleric, the seriousness without the austerity of the melancholic, the calmness without the apathy of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was presided over by Mr Justice Monkhouse, one of those who are jeered at as humorous judges, but who are generally much more serious than the serious judges, for their levity comes from a living impatience of professional solemnity; while the serious judge is really filled with frivolity, because he is filled with vanity. All the chief actors being of a worldly importance, the barristers ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... that you have, in the present age, many virtues and good qualities, which were either nearly or altogether unknown to your ancestors; but do you not exceed them in some follies and vices also? Is not the levity, dissipation, and extravagance of the women of this century arrived to a pitch unknown and unheard of in former times? Is not the course which you steer in life, almost entirely directed by vanity and fashion? And are there not too many of you who, throwing ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... He was quite ready to believe in the anchorite's confession, for the more unworthy the man for whom Sirona had broken faith, the greater seemed her guilt, and the more unpardonable her levity; and to his man's vanity it seemed to him easier—particularly in the presence of such witnesses as Petrus and Dorothea—to bear the fact that his wife should have sought variety and pleasure at any cost, even at that of devoting herself ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and levity, 'I've been a manager of one thing and another for over twenty years. That's what I was cut out for—to have somebody else to put up the money and look after the repairs and the police and taxes while I run the business. I never had a dollar of my ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... added,—and he had no apology to make for indulging in levity in discussing this frivolous matter—it was beneath the dignity of the House to occupy itself with the further consideration of the charges against the honourable member for Middlesex. These charges were so trivial and ill-founded, and they originated in such a trumpery fear lest the Crown should ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... topical frippery that passes for a certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... But his levity did not disturb the fat boy in the least. After having had his plate heaped with beans and bacon, Stacy calmly took from his pocket two sharp sticks that he had cut and trimmed just before supper. On one of these he speared a piece of bacon, stringing several beans on ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse—such were the characteristics of the brilliant group ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... sometimes seems to hide the Stars from us: In the days foregoing, and following, the Vapors have been {158} drawn up so Invisibly, that the Air and Sky seem'd very clear all day long. This I account a great change between ascending and descending Dews and Vapors (which import Levity and Weight,) and between thick Air and clear Air: which changes do sometimes continue in the Alternative course of day and night, for a week or fortnight together; and yet the Baroscope ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... he gives a map of the Bakhatla country with its rivers and mountains, and is quite at home in the geographical details, crowning his description with some sentimental and half-ludicrous lines of poetry. No reasonable man will fancy that in the wailings of his heart there was any levity or want of sincerity. What we are about to copy merits careful consideration: first, as evincing the depth and tenderness of his love for these black savages; next, as showing that it was pre-eminently Christian love, intensified by his vivid view of the ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Wandsworth High Street, so that, as he put it, he might feel that she was near him; with the desolating result that they weren't by any means, no, not by a long chalk, so near. For Maudie, out of levity or sheer exuberant kindness of the heart, had persuaded Winny Dymond to join the Polytechnic. In her proud beauty and in her affianced state she could afford to be exuberantly kind. And Booty in his vision of nearness had been counting on the long journey by night ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Doolittle ("Social Life of the Chinese," ii. p. 203) asserts that "there are most indubitable reasons for believing that infanticide is tolerated by the Government, and that the subject is treated with indifference and with shocking levity by the mass." ... But Bishop Moule "has good reason to conclude that the prevalence of the crime has been largely exaggerated." (Journal, China Branch R.A.S., ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... of opinion. He urges the sending of "stiff-backed" men, to thwart the threatened success of the friends of peace, and concludes with an expression of the humane and patriotic sentiment that "without a little bloodletting" the Union would not be "worth a rush."[131] With such unworthy levity did these leaders of sectional strife express their exultation in the prospect of the conflict, which was to drench the land with blood and enshroud ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... him from his wife's family, she attacked the wife herself. With all the cunning and smoothness of a seducing demon, she encompassed the young man's heart, and filled it with mistrust against Josephine. She accused the forsaken one with levity and unfaithfulness; she filled his heart with jealousy and rancor; she used all the means of perfidy and calumny of which a woman is capable, and in which she finds a refuge when her object is to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... us to go into the Silences — only we never quite learned, for some of the girls would giggle. There are always people like that. The dear Swami! — he was so patient! It was Occidental levity, he said, and we ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... Beaune, a town of Burgundy, where the fugitives proposed to study music under the Fathers of the Oratory. To provide funds for the journey, he stole a sum of about the value of a dollar from his uncle, the priest. This act, which seems to have been a mere peccadillo of boyish levity, determined his future career. Finding himself in total destitution at Beaune, he wrote to his mother for money, and received in reply an order from his father to come home. Stung with the thought of being ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... mainly to his levity. If he passed briskly from one camp to the other, an impartial [v.04 p.0668] observer might usually detect some personal motive at the bottom. But it is hardly probable that he was himself conscious of anything of the sort. When he was in reality acting under ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... constantly and inevitably, were it only through its connection with science ever more and more exquisite, and through its augmented costliness,—all this may have its use in offering some restraint upon the levity of action or of declamation in Peace Societies. But all this is below the occasion. I feel that far grander interests are at stake in this contest. The Peace Societies are falsely appreciated, when they are described as merely deaf to the lessons of experience, and as too "romantic" ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in order to forestall by theft a promised generosity. He opened the door of the bed-chamber in a hushed silence; but the wrenching of the cofferlid awoke the sleeper, and Gilderoy, having cut his mother's throat with an infamous levity, seized whatever money and jewels were in the house, cruelly maltreated his sister, and laughingly burnt the house to the ground, that the possibility of evidence might ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... trunk; they fall by hundreds in our wars. They are born leaders where acumen and craft are not needed. Large game was made for them, and they for it. They are the vermin destroyers of the universe. They throw life from them with both hands, they play the game of life with a levity which they never showed in the ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... so much mischief in his nature that he would rebound at any moment from a mood of pathos or seriousness to one of levity. "Well, Annette," and he leaned yearningly towards her, "when you leave me to take the chances of this tumultuous time, the greatest light that I have known will have gone out ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... all have the liver and lungs too close to the diaphragm, because that damnable invention of Sir Isaac Newton's slumbers not nor sleeps, and all the vital organs droop and drop when we neglect deep breathing. Inertia is a vice. The gods cultivate levitation, which is a different thing from levity, meaning skyey gravitation, uplift, aspiration expressed in bodily attitude. When levitation lets go, gravity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... it admires, it extols, only because it is the fashion, not from any love of the subject or the man. It cries you up or runs you down out of mere caprice and levity. If you have pleased it, it is jealous of its own involuntary acknowledgment of merit, and seizes the first opportunity, the first shabby pretext, to pick a quarrel with you and be quits once more. Every petty caviller ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... exercised over my "wound"—as she persisted in calling the scratch on my cheek—and the loss of the ruby to encourage any levity. Honestly, at that moment I cared not a whit for the ruby. Besides, there were consolations which I need not record. It was real—very, very real; and I was the happiest ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... her under conditions that would develop her young life happily and therefore healthfully. There is the widest difference in the world between cheerfulness and mirthfulness which arise from happy home life and peaceful hearts, and the levity that is at once unfeeling, inconsiderate, and a sure indication of a coarse-fibred, ill-bred nature. Amy was made to feel this, and she found little indeed which jarred with memories that were only sad, not bitter or essentially depressing. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... periods of the Revolution, he, in common with many of his countrymen, conformed to the fashion of treating all such matters, both in conversation and action, with levity and even derision. In his subsequent career, like most men exposed to wonderful vicissitudes, he professed, half in jest and half in earnest, a sort of confidence in fatalism and predestination. But on some ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... sadly as she heard it, remembering that Dick had said once that, even if he were safe within the gates of Paradise, the sound of his father's footsteps would make the chills run up his backbone. She had reproved the levity of the remark at the time, but she often thought of it, especially when she knew there was trouble ahead—as there ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... what is the reason of this?" The villagers could think of no answer and the jackal bade them ask his wife: so they laughed and asked whether it was true that she dropped dung twice to the he-jackal's once. But the jackal reproved them for their levity, wise men of old had said that it was wrong to jest when men of weight met to decide a dispute; so they became serious and the she-jackal answered "It is true that I drop dung twice to his once: there is an order laid on me to ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... Miss Blanchard's maid go abroad with their mistresses. The third exceptional case is the case of the upper housemaid; and here there is a little hitch. In plain words, the housemaid has been sent away at a moment's notice, for what Mrs. Blanchard rather mysteriously describes as 'levity of conduct with ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... of oratory, let us now make a diversion to poetry. Poetry, in the primogeniture, had many peccant humours, and is made to have more now, through the levity and inconstancy of men's judgments. Whereas, indeed, it is the most prevailing eloquence, and of the most exalted caract. Now the discredits and disgraces are many it hath received through men's study of depravation ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... his mind. Having begun a friendship for Mary he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson and thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of talk. He remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers in the shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments had come back to his mind as he walked through the streets with his newspapers and had given him a kind of jolt. He went along under ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... followed by an approving little escort of nurses and novices, for it was of course permissible to appreciate and admire the smart clothes of a benefactress, whereas it would have been the height of levity to bestow so much attention on a lady visitor who was merely fashionable and had done nothing for the institution. This, at least, was the novices' point of view. But the little white volcano seemed quietly cross, and held her small head very high as she led the Princess ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... herself looking into a pair of grave, earnest blue eyes, and there was no sign of levity or derision in the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of myself if I stood in my own light. Anything for a good view. But I'm afraid it's too late." His tone dropped from the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest. "We've done our work, and it can't be undone. We've given Nature a human voice, and now we shall never—never ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Never in all his life would he forget the blank dismay of his mother when the head of the gymnasium interviewed her and told her of the inevitable expulsion. "Levity, carelessness, lack of industry, superficiality in almost every subject," thus ran the reports of ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... secrecy, and waited for the performance, not wholly hopeless of success. He visited the work, from time to time, observed its progress, and remarked many ingenious contrivances, to facilitate motion, and unite levity with strength. The artist was every day more certain, that he should leave vultures and eagles behind him, and the contagion of his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to the left. He saw his own clothes there. He had forgotten all about them. They were wrinkled and scarcely fit to wear—all but his old slouch hat. He smiled as he recalled that at school it was thought he showed undue levity for a theological student in wearing so weather-beaten and rakish a hat. He was glad of the opportunity to exchange for it the one he now wore. He picked it up from the chair where it lay. Beneath the rim, but protruding so as to be easily seen, ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... transform himself into any character tragic or comic, and seize instantaneously upon any passion of the human mind. He could make a sudden transition from violent rage, and even madness, to the extremes of levity and humor, and go through the whole circle of theatric evolution with the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... object of loving, jealous, zealous care on the part of their mothers. John Milton talked like an oracle while yet a child, and one biographer records that even as a babe he sometimes mildly reproved his parents for levity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... health or his self-respect. He had trifled with life, and must pay the penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the case; for shall we not, one and all, deserve ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with peculiar excellencies. In Antigone we have the purest display of feminine heroism; in Ajax the sense of manly honour in its full force; in the Trachiniae (or, as we should rather name it, the Dying Hercules), the female levity of Dejanira is beautifully atoned for by her death, and the sufferings of Hercules are portrayed with suitable dignity; Electra is distinguished by energy and pathos; in Oedipus Coloneus there prevails a mild and gentle emotion, and over the whole ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the Sarmatians soon forgot, with the levity of barbarians, the services which they had so lately received, and the dangers which still threatened their safety. Their inroads on the territory of the empire provoked the indignation of Constantine to leave them to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Apostate, rebelled against Constantius, his cousin-german, in the spring, in 360, and by his death, in November, 361, obtained the empire. He was one of the most infamous dissemblers that ever lived. Craft, levity, inconstancy, falsehood, want of judgment, and an excessive vanity, discovered themselves in all his actions, and appear in his writings, namely, his epistles, his satire called Misopogon, and his lives of the Caesars. He wrote the last work to censure all the former emperors, that he might ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... a hermit or a hero, of Saint Austin or Guy, Earl of Warwick, ludicrous or legendary, religious or romantic, a history or an allegory, he writes with facility. His transitions were rapid, from works of the most serious and laborious kind, to sallies of levity and pieces of popular entertainment. His muse was of universal access; and he was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the Company of Goldsmiths, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... he can produce his 'Report on the Penal Code;' and reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which shall become famous and world-famous. This is the product of Guillotin's endeavours, gained not without meditation and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: La Guillotine! "With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tete) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;"—whereat they all laugh. (Moniteur ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... no time for levity," said the coroner, sternly. "You have escaped a murder charge only by grace of this young ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... more Henry's misfortune than his fault that he grew up to manhood as a compound of sensuality, levity, malice, treachery, and other mean qualities, for his nature had in it much that was good, and in his after-life he displayed noble qualities which had been long hidden under the corrupting faults of his education. The crime of the ambitious ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... safe keeping of each in turn. Above all, how would this royal girl, on whose conduct so much depended, demean herself on this crucial occasion? Surely if she were overcome by timidity and apprehension, if she were goaded into some foolish demonstration of pride or levity, allowance must be made, and a good deal forgiven, because of the cruel strain to which she ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... makes us grin with the excrescence of a word of two or three syllables in the close. It is, indeed, below so great a master to make use of such a little instrument. But his good sense is perpetually shining through all he writes; it affords us not the time of finding faults: we pass through the levity of his rhyme, and are immediately carried into some admirable useful thought. After all, he has chosen this kind of verse, and has written the best in it, and had he taken another he would always have excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatsoever his office be, he still makes it ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... these considerate pioneers, if he does spare it his attention, he must only do so at his leisure, for the author "introduces All his Sections (and too often interweaves the serious Body of his meanings), with long Runs of bantering Levity, which his [Fielding's] Good sense may suffer by Effect of." "It is true (they continue), he seems to wear this Lightness, as a grave Head sometime wears a Feather: which tho' He and Fashion may consider ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and desires. I doubt if you could find a man in Europe so bold as to attempt this piece of tact and government. And seemingly Tembinok' himself had trouble in the beginning. I hear of him shooting at a wife for some levity on board a schooner. Another, on some more serious offence, he slew outright; he exposed her body in an open box, and (to make the warning more memorable) suffered it to putrefy before the palace gate. Doubtless his growing years have come to his assistance; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
