"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Surface, "that you never have such reason to hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and there was none so poor ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... growled. "Do they suppose that a Frenchman is afraid of them?" and so, with an ostentatious sign of the cross, he took his place upon his knees beside the others. Foul, bedraggled, and wretched, the seven figures knelt and waited humbly for their fate under the black shadow of ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... herself, more and more persecuted by Napoleon; she feared that Rocca might be ordered off on active duty, and she fled first to Vienna, then to St Petersburg, then to Stockholm, and so to England. Here she was received with ostentatious welcome and praises by the Whigs; with politeness by everybody; with more or less concealed terror by the best people, who found her rhapsodies and her political dissertations equally boring. Here too she was unlucky enough to express the opinion that Miss Austen's ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... born and reared in the midst of that ostentatious greatness which he looked on as his own by divine right; whereas his father remembered that it had chiefly become his by fortuitous acquirement, and much of it by means not likely to look well in the sight of Heaven. This son was Charles, count of Charolois, afterward celebrated ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... work.' He sometime afterwards laid aside this dial-plate; and when I asked him the reason, he said, 'It might do very well upon a clock which a man keeps in his closet; but to have it upon his watch which he carries about with him, and which is often looked at by others, might be censured as ostentatious.' Mr. Steevens is now possessed of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... eclipse by his splendid dress. But with his simple Musketeer's uniform and nothing but the manner in which he threw back his head and advanced his foot, Athos instantly took the place which was his due and consigned the ostentatious Porthos to the second rank. Porthos consoled himself by filling the antechamber of M. de Treville and the guardroom of the Louvre with the accounts of his love scrapes, after having passed from professional ladies to military ladies, from the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... countryman, the Rev. Dr. J.P. Thompson, long-beloved pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle Church, New York. Here, also, Bayard Taylor was for a time laid to rest, before being finally removed to his native land. Decorations are not so ostentatious as in Catholic countries; and quiet ivy, simple greensward, and the shadow of trees in which birds may sing, make the quaint Berlin cemeteries attractive places. This was to us especially true of the ancient ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... disposition to keep a quiet order of memorandums, and a diary extending back for many years, from which had we the space to spare in this book we would place before the world some of the gems found in his jewel-box, as indicative of the man's industry and the Christian's freedom from ostentatious display. ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over the roadbed ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... bit worse than the average. That diamond ring of his is a real diamond, but you can buy imitations that can't be told from the real thing except by an expert, so his diamond doesn't offend anyone by being ostentatious. And it's unfaceted, to ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... High Priest threatens to appeal to Rome. Pilate fears to face such an appeal. He has little confidence in the favor or the justice of the Caesar whom he serves. At last he consents to what he calls "a great wrong in order to avert a greater evil." He calls for water, and washes his hands in ostentatious innocence. Finally, as he signs the verdict of condemnation in wrath and disgust, he breaks his staff of office, and flings the fragments upon the stairs, at the feet of ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... shrewd English traveller calls "the illegitimate development of private wealth" attained such proportions in modern times as in America, and especially in California. Nowhere, too, in the world is the ostentatious waste of the results of labour upon the antics of a frivolous plutocracy a more crying peril of our times than in America. Henry George, an American of the Eastern States, who went to the Pacific coast as a lad, had grown up with and watched the progress ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... was that, contrary to what one is made to expect, I did not find among the clergy that aggressive and ostentatious proselytism. Everything is conducted in a dignified, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... polished guests—miserable worms like himself—of uttering a word of thanksgiving to the great Dispenser of all the blessings bestowed on him? Should a bishop, or some high dignitary of the church, be present, then perhaps, in an ostentatious tone, he is requested to ask a blessing on the banquet; and grace for once is uttered in an audible voice. Far be it from me to say that this is always the case, but who can deny that it is too often so? My young friends, I have learned many things in my voyage ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... told the story of torn tendons and blood-vessels too long neglected, and of the hardships of the journey. Slaves were sent scurrying, in this direction and that, to compound lotions and spread poultices, while Agathocles himself proceeded to the ostentatious mixing of some cooling draught calculated to ward off, if possible, the fever that was already claiming ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... who had not been let into the secret that the messenger had been met at Dover; and thus magnificently fitted out to satisfy the requirements of the butcher's son of Ipswich, and of one of the most ostentatious ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... palace intrusted to him; and he availed himself of this charge, not as the guardian of the royal family, but rather as their jailer,[1] placing his sentries so as to be spies and a restraint upon all their movements, and seeking every opportunity to gain an ignoble popularity by an ostentatious disregard of all their wishes, and of all courtesy, not to say decency, in his behavior to them.[2] And these considerations led the king, not only to authorize the Baron de Breteuil, who, as we have seen, had fled from the country in the previous year, to treat with any foreign princes who might ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... to his Maker this chronicle does not lie—obtrusive and ostentatious though they were in tone and attitude. Enough that they were a general arraignment of humanity, the Bar, himself, and his brother, and indeed much that the same Maker had created and permitted. That through this hopeless denunciation still ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... awakens in dyspeptics, came the more pretentious and the more permanent structures of the restaurants and eating-places, with stairways and verandas, facades of ornate but inexpensive stucco, masking the frailty of such pomp under ostentatious names: The Paris Hotel and Restaurant, The Miramar, The Fonda del Buen Gusto; and between these pedants of summer-time gastronomy, the lunch-rooms of the natives, huts with roofs of matting, ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... orthodox.' Never in any way does he refer to this episode of his life, but the Life of Johnson is, as we shall have occasion to show, the life in many ways also of its author, who says of himself that, 'from a certain peculiarly frank, open, and ostentatious disposition which he avows, his history, like that of the old Seigneur Michael de Montaigne, is to be traced in ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... when his vehemence abates. But as to the countenance, which next to the voice has the greatest efficacy, what dignity and gracefulness is it not capable of supporting! and when you have been careful that it may neither be unmeaning, nor ostentatious, there is still much to be left to the expression of the eyes. For if the countenance is the image of the mind, the eyes are it's interpreters, whose degree of pleasantry or sadness must be proportioned to the importance of ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... middle of the death-chamber, is not often to be found in tragic scenes. Her shoulders were bent beneath the burden of an enormous bundle of bed clothing, and her arms were dragged down by the weight of two large baskets of provisions. She was much too absorbed in her own ostentatious benevolence to look at once towards the bed and see what had happened there. Probably, if she glanced at the group at all, she supposed that Hannah was only bathing Nora's head; for instead of going forward or tendering any sympathy or assistance, she just let her huge bundle drop from ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... public character, and carefully avoided all display. His mission, therefore, put the government to scarcely any charge, and excited scarcely any murmurs. His place was now most unwisely supplied by a costly and ostentatious embassy, offensive in the highest degree to the people of England, and by no means welcome to the court of Rome. Castelmaine had it in charge to demand a Cardinal's hat for ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect itself unseen. It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties, and from thence form principles for his own conduct; such an examination is a continual exertion of the mind, as great, perhaps, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Raffles's hand that they had, but now I was in the hall among them. A red-faced barrel of a boy did all the holding, one hand round the wrist, the other palm to palm, and his knees braced up against the panel. Another was rendering ostentatious but ineffectual aid, and three or four others danced about in their pyjamas. After all, they were not more than four to one. I had raised my voice, so that Raffles might hear me and take heart, and now I raised it ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... walls were covered with thick ivy and wall flowers. The pedlar sat on a large gray stone, with his red cap on and his brown fingers adorned with splendid rings, and he spread them out and waved his hands to the people with ostentatious ceremony. ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... Courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers. On no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in a subject where no layman who has indulged in such copious and ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in keeping himself ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... ours, that it seems to me absurd to manage any argument so as to set the two sexes at variance by vain contention for superiority. It ought not to be our object to make an invidious division of privileges, or an ostentatious declaration of rights, but to determine what is most for our ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... Protagoras, Prodicus and others he learnt to laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his abilities ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... party, like a camp, has its sutlers and camp-followers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it collects round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who relax its discipline and dishonour its flag by their irregularities, and who, after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... should take alarm at his sudden change of manner, he studied her face anxiously as he set her feet to the ground. But there was no cause for uneasiness. So far from resenting the liberty he had taken after so many days of almost ostentatious respect, Victoria was not even thinking of him, and her indifference would have been a blow, if he had not been too greatly relieved to be hurt by it. She was looking at his father, the Agha, who seemed to her the embodiment of some ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... become men of business, and dash into the game of commerce as they would into the hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of "unexampled prosperity," let him look upon the whole as a "weather-breeder," and prepare ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... gone, I crossed to her and spoke. She looked inexpressibly charming in her white cotton gown and neat straw sailor hat with black velvet band. There was nothing ostentatious about her dress, but it was always well cut and fitted her to perfection. She possessed a style and ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... for Mr. Tutt to hurry off to the Tombs and bail out old Danny Lowry, a self-confessed lawbreaker, giving his own bond and the house on Twenty-third Street as security. Still more so, as more unblushingly ostentatious, was his taking the criminal over to Pont's and giving him the very best dinner that Signor Faccini, proprietor of ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the streets, they were concealed from the gaze of the curious. In their hot-houses, it was common to have mirrors in the ceilings, which at once reflected the street passengers to those who were on the floor, and enabled the ostentatious to display to the public eye the decorations of their tables, whenever ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... bartering with the contractors for public works, mingling in the financial affairs of the state every time that there was any occasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulged in ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the Lex sumptuaria, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it is easy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtues she set. Claudius either knew nothing ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... existed—not limited either by customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secret, disowning its own existence, baptized with ostentatious names of democracy, obsequious to the people for the sake of governing them; this nameless, lurking aristocracy, that ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Claparon's private office. Between the ostentatious reception-room of Francois Keller and the untidy abode of the counterfeit banker, there was all the difference that exists between Versailles and the wigwam of a Huron chief. Birotteau had witnessed the splendors of finance; he was now to see its fooleries. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... me. I must and I will accomplish it to the honor of God and the Holy Madonna. This blasphemous war must end; this atheistical and free-thinking king must be reduced, humbled, and cast down from the stage he has mounted with such ostentatious bravado. Silesia must be torn from the hands of this profligate robber and incorporated in the crown of our apostolic majesty of Austria. The holy Church dare not lose any of her provinces, and Silesia will be lost if it remains ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison." Benjamin Franklin, as we know from his Autobiography, followed this advice with admirable results. Addison's style seems as natural and easy ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... ringing intermittently, and hurried into the kitchen. She put a second bottle of ginger ale on the ice, brought a hammered brass tray and two glasses from the butler's pantry, then substituted a less ostentatious bamboo tray, hesitated, and then put them ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... considered wrong by our forefathers to surround themselves with beautiful things, and any but the simplest comforts. Some people are of that opinion still, but I do not agree with them. Your own good sense will be the best criterion of what is unduly ostentatious; but never hesitate to have anything you may wish because you fear the verdict of others. In short, be independent, and think for yourself if you wish to be happy. Your Aunt Helen has undertaken the charge of your wardrobe; that is something of which I know nothing. I can tell ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... he displayed superior genius, and with less profundity more gaiety. He might have considered that the facility and vivacity of his pleasing compositions were preferable to that art, that habitual pomp, and that ostentatious eloquence, which prevail in the operose labours of Johnson. No one might be more sensible than himself, that he, according to the happy expression of Johnson (when his rival was in his grave), "tetigit et ornavit." Goldsmith, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... own deficiencies, and to supply them by the help of others; and, in his opinion, modesty is a quality so amiable and rare, that it ought to find a patron wherever it appears, and may justly be preferred by the publick suffrage to petulant wit and ostentatious literature. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... was enchanted. From the beginning she had been alarmed when his miracle of a niece was brought into the house. The ostentatious partiality with which he introduced her into society produced results which went beyond his previsions. The crowd of worshippers kept growing greater and denser; after the episode with the King the enthusiasm rose to a kind of frenzy for a time. The rate of speed grew with the number; the ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... degree. Having a good title to military distinction himself, he could afford, as the unwarlike emperors could not, to be generous to his officers. The common soldiers, on the other hand, were fascinated by his personal prowess and his somewhat ostentatious camaraderie. His features were firm and clearly cut; his figure was tall and soldierly, and exhibited the sinewy hard health of a veteran campaigner. His hair was already gray before he came to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to envy you, but I do," she said, softly. "You'll both come in simply glittering, and I'll have to brag that you're my near relatives. I'm such an ostentatious beast that I'd have to show off ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... eye and an animated face that betokened the joy and pride she felt in the service which her friend was called upon to perform. Zulma affected not to see Hardinge and looked away over to the American side with an ostentatious ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... frank and as it were inviting conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was elaborate, though not ostentatious, and seemed well adapted as a social setting for Joseph Crawford and his family. It should have been inhabited by men and women in gala dress and ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... for the nice display of his unusual talents. History hath sneered at his rhymes as flat, stale and unprofitable; upon the bloody field he had been defeated and subsequently imprisoned; clever in diplomacy, the sagacity of his opponent, Charles, had in truth overmatched him; yet as the ostentatious Boniface, in grand bib and tucker, prodigal in joviality and good-fellowship, his ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and looked at him. He was a fair boy, with round pink cheeks, with his hair parted on one side, and a shade of down on his lip. He looked frankly what he was—a hobbledehoy—though he made great efforts to seem grown up. He was dressed with ostentatious care—flannel suit, light gloves, white shoes, and a pale blue tie—and he carried a little stick in his hand. He looked at Jean-Christophe out of the corner of his eye without turning his head, with his neck stiff, like a hen; ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... is chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their excitement when an attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while the assault on Charleston was going on, and in their desire to get their friends and relatives away from the Rebels,—an appreciation of freedom, if not ostentatious, at least sensible. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... also young men dressed expensively and wearing arms, were exchanging jokes with that sort of ostentatious laughter which implies a desire to prove that the laughter is not mortified though some people might suspect it. There were good reasons for such a suspicion; for this broad-shouldered man with ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... ostentatious attempt at legal phraseology and knew, even without the evidence of his angular writing, that the document was genuine. She knew also that Robert Grant Burns was justified in ordering her off that bench; she had no ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... with Her Majesty, his wife, Dona Eugenia, was present, "to avoid scandal." It is probably safe to say that as Valenzuela rose in power this precaution was thrown to the winds, and on more than one occasion "he made an ostentatious display of his high favor, affected the airs of a successful lover, as well as of a prime minister; and it did not escape notice that his usual device in tournaments was an eagle gazing at the sun, with the motto Tengo solo licencia, 'I alone ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... village of Wiltshire is noted as the birthplace of Addison, who was the son of a clergyman, afterward the Dean of Lichfield. An erstwhile resident of Lichfield, Samuel Johnson by name, once said of Joseph Addison, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... at his desk copying from his Primer on to his slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left the rows of ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... looked strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's Parisian toilet had an air of provincial assumption; her own pretty Zouave jacket and black silk skirt horrified her with its apparent ostentatious eccentricity; and Mrs. Markham and Miss Chubb seemed dowdy and overdressed beside the satin mantillas and black lace of the Senoritas. Nor were the gentlemen less outres: the stiff correctness of Mr. Banks, and the lighter foppishness ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... this time they had given Mrs. Hilary so much time to recover her poise that she could join in, and say that Anglo-Catholics were very ostentatious people, and only gave all that money which they had, undoubtedly, given at the recent Congress in order to make ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the increase, many of which were left, by persons unknown, in the houses of poor women, who received with them very considerable sums of money. At first, no suspicion whatever fell on the friars, who continued their offices of preaching, saying mass, confessing penitents, and giving ostentatious indications of their leading humble and ascetic lives. A diligent watch was instituted by the authorities, but as far as exterior observances went, there was no reason to believe that any suspicious persons from without ever entered the convent of the nuns; it was therefore thought right to ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... and graceful, and smiling. They were quietly, even simply, attired, but their whole air and carriage breathed that indefinable something which she had just struggled to define: something diametrically different from the ostentatious display of the woman by her side. Theoretically, Cornelia was thankful to escape observation; in reality she felt an absurd pang of loneliness and disappointment, as the carriage bore ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... their native clime, early and rapidly, it is sad to know that it also fades prematurely. One looks in vain for that serene loveliness combined with age which so frequently challenges our admiration at the North. Their costume is never ostentatious, though often costly, and sometimes a little too mixed or variegated when seen in public. At home, however, nothing of this sort is observed. There the dress is usually composed of the most delicate muslin, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... of peanut brittle and made sure that no vestige remained of the box of assorted chocolates which had preceded it down the Great Hungry Way, assembled three comic weeklies and four magazines, gave the porter a quarter for his ostentatious devotions and descended at the station, with exactly seven cents in his pocket, having calculated his budget ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... that nothing but his great poetry procured him the reception, and that nobody present competed with him in the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the different kinds of retainers that could sit at a prince's table in those days, Can, who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence, kept a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into lodgings classified according to their pursuits;[20] and Dante only shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could no longer endure either the buffoonery ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... whole morning Pierre was seen animating the town-hall with his goings and comings. He was absolutely alone in the large, empty building, whose lofty halls reechoed with the noise of his heels. All the doors were left open. He made an ostentatious show of his presidency over a non-existent council in the midst of this desert, and appeared so deeply impressed with the responsibility of his mission that the doorkeeper, meeting him two or three times ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... The indications of reduced circumstances in the male of the better class are, I fancy, first visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the shirt showing an extent of ostentatious surface that is invariably fatal to the threadbare waist-coat that it partially covers. He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from his ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... included in Sattwa or Goodness are gladness, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, fame, righteousness, contentment, faith, sincerity, liberality, and lordship. The nine properties included in Rajas or Passion are belief in the deities, (ostentatious) charity, enjoyment and endurance of happiness and sorrow, disunion, exhibition of manliness, lust and wrath, intoxication, pride, malice, and disposition to revile. The eight qualities included in Tamas or Darkness are unconsciousness, stupefaction, excess ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the only theater of his ostentatious devotion. In Binondo, in Pampanga, and in the town of San Diego, when he was about to put up a fighting-cock with large wagers, he would send gold moneys to the curate for propitiatory masses and, just as the Romans consulted the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... phylacteries," lest malice should spy some holes in his conduct; for such is the meaning of "standing at a guard with envy": whereas "virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful" in that kind. The Duke knows that such an ostentatious strictness, however it may take with the multitude, is among the proper symptoms of a bad conscience; that such high professions of righteousness are seldom used but as a mask to cover some secret delinquencies ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know the object ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... peculiarities; yet that which really makes though not the splendour, the felicity of life, and that which every wise man will choose for his final and lasting companion in the languor of age, in the quiet of privacy, when he departs weary and disgusted from the ostentatious, the volatile, and the vain. Of such a character, which the dull overlook, and the gay despise, it was fit that the value should be made known, and the dignity established. Domestick virtue, as it is exerted without great occasions, or conspicuous ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... France, Charles IX., who was of about the same age with Henry, and who had been his companion and playmate in childhood, was now married to Elizabeth, the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian II. of Austria. Their nuptials were celebrated with all the ostentatious pomp which the luxury of the times and the opulence of the French monarchy could furnish. In these rejoicings the courts of France and Navarre participated with the semblance of the most heartfelt cordiality. Protestants ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... funeral ceremonies with great parade and pomp is usually more of a vain and ostentatious display than an act of respect towards the dead; at the same time, any meanness or parsimony is in bad taste. The expenses should be governed by the position of the deceased, and the means of ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... bring them to fruition, but they become audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century, drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... strongly marked by his individuality. Although he doubtless admired, and perhaps imitated, the condensation and dignity of Gibbon, yet it is certain that he carefully avoided the monotonous stateliness and the elaborate and ostentatious art of that most erudite historian. I look in vain for his model in the skeptical Gibbon, the cynical Bolingbroke, or the gorgeous Burke. These were all to him intellectual giants; but giants of false belief and practice. ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... the long word philanthropy, which is much more genteel and comprehensive. Charity, the meekest of the Christian graces, has been long since dethroned, and her place is taken by the blatant braggard Philanthropy, who does his good deeds in a most ostentatious manner, and loudly invites the world to see his generosity, and praise him for it. Charity, modestly hooded, went into the houses of the poor, and tendered her gifts with smiles. Philanthropy now builds ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Segur, who, writes Tooke (ibid., p. 326), "lived a long time in habits of intimacy with him, and was so obliging as to delineate it at our solicitation." "In his person were collected the most opposite defects and advantages of every kind. He was avaricious and ostentatious, ... haughty and obliging, politic and confiding, licentious and superstitious, bold and timid, ambitious and indiscreet; lavish of his bounties to his relations, his mistresses, and his favourites, yet frequently paying neither ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... tutors any of the ejected clergy, and also that none of the ejected should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself that there would be great delicacy in the application of it, so as to favour such of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... came into our garden or who had an opportunity of seeing a bloom elsewhere; and, sooth to say, we were rather ostentatious in our display; John put it into stands, and jars, and baskets, and dishes; Dick stuck it into Dash's collar, his own button-hole, and Pearl's bridle; my father presented it to such lady visiters as he delighted to honour; and I, who have the habit of dangling a flower, generally ...
— The Lost Dahlia • Mary Russell Mitford
... rose as Miss Fairfax entered, and bowed to her with deference. Bessie, being forbidden by her mother to retreat, sat down with ostentatious resignation to bear what was to come. But her bravado was not well enough grounded to sustain her long. The preliminaries were already concluded when she arrived, and Mrs. Carnegie was giving utterance to her usual regret that her dear little girl had not been ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Martin, to Elba we go, and soon, if you will govern your temper," said Mrs. Cavely. "You're an angel to let me speak of it so, and it's only that man that irritates you. I call him sinfully ostentatious." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford! There, economy was always "elegant," and money-spending always "vulgar and ostentatious;" a sort of sour-grapeism which made us very peaceful and satisfied. I never shall forget the dismay felt when a certain Captain Brown came to live at Cranford, and openly spoke about his being poor—not in a whisper ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... seemingly, of writing a dispatch like Caesar's, announcing, in the same breath, the sight and conquest of his enemy. Marion and his little troop of twenty men, made but a sorry figure in the presence of the Continental General. Gates was a man of moderate abilities, a vain man, of a swelling and ostentatious habit, whose judgment was very apt to be affected by parade, and the external show of things. Some of his leading opinions were calculated to show that he was unfit for a commander in the South. For example, he thought little of cavalry, which, in a plain country, sparsely settled, was among ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... me her house is magnificently furnished, and she tried footmen and butlers in livery, but she couldn't keep that up. John made such a fuss she had to stop. Mrs. Maxwell always was the most pretentious, ostentatious sort of person, and I never could understand how her son could be such a natural kind of a fellow with such a mother. He's like his father. They say his father's family was rather plain once, but his mother comes of very good New Jersey stock. ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... title In 1731 was "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... scene opened brilliantly in the home of Calvin Wentworth, a millionaire mine-owner. Into the garish and vulgarly ostentatious reception-room a pale, sweet slip of a girl drifted, with big eyes shining with joy of her home-coming. Some of the auditors again failed to recognize the great actress, so wonderful was her transformation in look and manner. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... is not in good taste to make an ostentatious display of the gifts, and if they are exhibited, the cards of the donors should be removed, and only ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... ostentatious understanding. Rising, she seized Romeo's cage and placed it more conspicuously near her. She was critically watched by the older women. They viewed the thing with mingled feelings, one or two going so far as to murmur darkly, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... herself in a place of this sort, like a trolloping gipsy wench! It takes a New York millionairess or a Roman empress or one of Charles the Second's duchesses to plunge as deep as this. You, with your golden pedestal—you, with your ostentatious airs and graces—you, with your condescending to give a man a chance to repent his sins and turn over a new leaf! Damn it," rising to a sort of frenzy, "what are you doing waiting in a hole like this—in this weather—at ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Milly and I saw him at a little distance in our walks. He never attempted to join us. Once only he passed so near that some recognition was inevitable, and he stopped and in silence lifted his hat with an awkward respect. But although he did not approach us, he was ostentatious with a kind of telegraphic civility in the distance. He opened gates, he whistled his dogs to 'heel,' he drove away cattle, and then himself withdrew. I really think he watched us occasionally to render these services, for in this distant way we encountered him decidedly ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... The north side was lined with five-story flat buildings, their dingy-red brick facades regularly broken by equally dingy brownstone stoops, as to the ground floor, by open windows as to those above. The south side was mostly taken up by a towering white apartment hotel with an ostentatious entrance; against one of whose polished stone pillars the short and thick-set man ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... as ashes and had some difficulty in sustaining himself to the parlour, where he and Malkiel the Second sat down in silence to await the young librarian's return. Frederick Smith came back in about five minutes, with an ostentatious-looking bottle smothered in gold leaf under ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... a cough; and Miss Bishop began reading to herself in ostentatious silence, till the provocations of the page ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... to its attractions. But now he was not only astonished by the well-ordered and unpretentious comfort of the house, but he was also shaken in his preconceived notions about the rich, when he came to make the acquaintance of the Garmans. Johnsen had expected to find something more ostentatious, especially at table; but the solid tone of the household, and the easy and polished manners of the family, perhaps most of all the presence of Rachel, finally caused him to change his original ideas. He regarded with suspicion the satisfaction he felt, after having been at Sandsgaard a few ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... might see or minister to the suffering woman ; they denied themselves no luxury for her sake. Yet the money they spent in giving a single party would have kept this family for a twelvemonth. The cost of their ostentatious greenhouse would have paid for a nurse, and educated the two orphan boys until able to go to trades. They had seen these twin boys tied to the washtub in their own bleak shed, that the mother might pursue her labor without interruption; yet as they gave no thought to the widow, so the orphans never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... haughty and inaccessible as a goddess. At seventeen Vaninka's education was finished, and her governess who had suffered in health through the severe climate of St. Petersburg, requested permission to leave. This desire was granted with the ostentatious recognition of which the Russian nobility are the last representatives in Europe. Thus Vaninka was left alone, with nothing but her father's blind adoration to direct her. She was his only daughter, as we have mentioned, and he ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Nettled by such ostentatious nonchalance, Kane drove another bullet into the snow within a few inches of the wolf's forefeet. This proved more effective. The great beast looked down at the place where the ball had struck, sniffed at it curiously, got up on all fours, and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... rich, Nick," I said to him one day, on his making an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered with a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, "I guess 'twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I'd got ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the Dutch school, for instance, and excepting always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist's power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless words: while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... occupied by the children and Hepsy Ann's self; and finally, but most important of all, the parlor, a mysterious and hermetically sealed apartment, which almost seemed to me an unconsecrated spot in this little temple of the homely virtues and affections,—a room furnished in a style somewhat ostentatious and decidedly uncomfortable, swept and dusted on Saturday afternoons by Hepsy Ann's own careful hands, sat in by the Captain and her for an hour or two on Sundays in awkward state, then darkened and locked for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... said the Mussulmans, "the ease with which you reconcile that evangelical meekness, of which you are so ostentatious, with the injuries and outrages with which you are constantly galling your neighbors. When you criminate so severely the great man whom we revere, we might fairly retort on the conduct of him whom you adore; but we scorn such advantages, and confining ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... old car he got the oars of the old flat bottom boat belonging to the troop. He also procured a black marking stick used for marking scout signs on rocks, and a pasteboard target on the back of which he printed in ostentatious lettering. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... village that we pass—and they are frequent after the Fallaba—there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it, mutely saying in their uncivilised way, "Try our noted chunks: best value for money"—(that is to say, tobacco, etc.), to the Move ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... eyes twinkled angrily. Rosy sometimes sat with her left hand pressed affectedly against her pink cheek, with the ring-finger bent slightly outward; and then she held up her spelling-book before her with her left hand, and the same ostentatious finger. ...
— Comfort Pease and her Gold Ring • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... their manners is admirably sustained: Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned. Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon's are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd. Lirope ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... exception to this rule, for there the 'nobili' led the same life as their fellow-citizens, and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The case was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The traditions of medieval Lombardy and Normandy, and the French aristocratic influences which followed, all tended in this ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... always take much interest, of experiencing great difficulty in obtaining the 'rapport,' as they term it. Dr. Mansfield frowned, shook his head and assumed an air of great doubt and perplexity. I was certain that there would be now an ostentatious display of the strip of paper, and sure enough, in a minute more the Medium, strip in hand, came over to my table, and shook his head ominously. He placed his left hand on the portion of the strip containing my question, and began tapping on it ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... Notwithstanding this ostentatious display of his hatred of all luxury, he was excessively fond of diamonds and other precious stones. He was also exceedingly superstitious, ever falling upon his knees before whatever priest he might meet, and imploring his benediction. Such men generally ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... one, just over against the end of the lake; and enjoy a rasher of bacon and eggs with as much gusto as if we were in the midst of a palace of fresco. Ornamental eating has become with us a species of gaudy, ostentatious vulgarity; and a dining-room a sort of fool's paradise. I never think of the little simple meal at St. Peter's now, without ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the widest part of the Campus Martius crowds of people are assembled before the gates of a palace. They are congregated to receive several baskets of provisions, distributed with ostentatious charity by the owner of the mansion. The incessant clamour and agitation of the impatient multitude form a strange contrast to the stately serenity of the natural and artificial objects by which they are enclosed on ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... submerged and moss-grown tombstones of a simple country churchyard. So great was the contrast between the modern and pretentious monument and the graves of the humbler forefathers of the village, that even the Americans who chanced to visit it were shocked at what they believed was the ostentatious and vulgar pride of one of their own countrywomen. For on its ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... another denunciation of ostentatious "churchiness" and "goodness," and religious posing. It is a lesson needed as much today as in the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... attempted, for fear of Blunt; and then came the second crisis. Blunt did not come one day—afterwards he admitted his deliberate intention—and through the tedious morning Whitey awaited the interval between the spells with an ostentatious impatience. He knew nothing of the scrapping lessons, and he spent the time in telling Denton and the vault generally of certain disagreeable ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... susperseded wood and brick; and magnificent Grecian and Gothic temples, resplendent in stained glass, taken the places of the humble, unpretentious meeting-houses, the thoughtful and judicious will sigh for those times of primitive simplicity, when an humble heart was more than an ostentatious offering, and God's word was listened to devoutly on hard seats instead of being dozed over in ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own; for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men. Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short, among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his tongue and to consult Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, book 2, chapter 4, and discover the opinion ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Vulcanic face hiding its burning brightness like a forge, he moved with ostentatious deference towards the scuttle, as if so far to escort their exit. But the junior magistrate, a kind-hearted man, troubled at what seemed to him a certain sardonical disdain, lurking beneath the foundling's humble ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... men. He saw in an instant that, notwithstanding my celebrity, I was simple in my manners and void of pretension, and as he seemed desirous of making a favourable impression on me, he assumed the tone most likely to attain his end. I have never beheld anyone more calm, more simple, more mild, or less ostentatious in appearance; nothing about him indicated the feeling of power in a great monarch; he spoke to me as an old acquaintance would speak to an equal, and what was more extraordinary on his part, he conversed with me exclusively for an hour and a half, to the great surprise ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... a conspicuous figure in the London society of his day. At the time of this correspondence he was thirty-five, and unmarried; he had inherited vast wealth in his youth and spent it freely. He was ostentatious, even for an age when extravagance was fashionable; but although he was conceited and on occasions foolish, he was certainly possessed of considerable intellectual gifts, and the things which interested him most in life were literature, ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... barn and the hedge stood a man and a woman, both young. The man was a well-set-up, comely fellow, with a fine head of chestnut hair tied in a queue by a broad bow of black satin. He was dressed with certain tawdry attempts at ostentatious embellishments, which did not prepossess one at first glance in his favour. His coat of a fashionable cut was of faded plum-coloured velvet edged with silver lace, whose glory had long since departed. He affected ruffles, but for want ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather we must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through ostentation they may at last ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... violations of propriety and customs: such is her child, but a few removes from infancy, being habited as chief mourner, to attend his parent to the grave; rings presented, and an escutcheon hung up, in a garret, at the funeral of a needy prostitute. The whole may be intended as a burlesque upon ostentatious and expensive funerals, which were then more customary than they are now. Mr. Pope has well ridiculed ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler |
