"Pedantry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But pedantry would not suggest this. The New Testament has [Greek: Solom[^o]n], and the Latin Christian poets have the o short. True, the Vatican Septuagint has [Greek: Sal[^o]m[^o]n], but there the vowel of ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... since, to think Mr. Somerville meant this as a sly hit at my schoolboy pedantry; but he was too well bred not to seek to relieve me from my mortification. "Oh!" said he, "Julia is our family book of reference for names, dates, and distances, and has an excellent memory for history ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... holding me by the arm, the way he used to in the old days before I went to school. I felt it very improper, for you can't go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit. But it was Jonathan, and he was my husband, and we didn't know anybody who saw us, and we didn't care if they did, so on we walked. I was looking at a very beautiful girl, in a big cart-wheel ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... the honor of having discovered the Coy Fountains. The Nemesis who never sleeps punished Bruce by the justest of retributions. His pompous and inflated style, his uncommon arrogance, and over-weening vanity, his affectation of pedantry, his many errors and misrepresentations, aroused against him a spirit which embittered the last years of his life. It is now the fashion to laud Bruce, and to pity his misfortunes. I cannot but think ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... letters of Cicero. Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new vintage. To Pavia ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... faults of style, to be sure,—principal among which is a tendency to make too much of the scientific investigation and the acquirement of the writer, extending sometimes almost to pedantry in the use of long words and large phrases; but it contains much information that is important and can be found nowhere else except by troublesome comparison of extended treatises, and a deal of plain common-sense that should commend it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to common sense that we could produce more of some particular thing without diminishing the supply of other things, that any apparent statement to the contrary may perhaps seem the height of academic pedantry. But let me ask the reader to consider with an open mind a familiar parallel. During the recent war there was inevitably much waste and muddle in the utilization of the military resources of the Allies. Some regiments would be kept inactive for long periods, ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... down in despair, finding that his companions, like the generality of raw students, were so completely wedded to their pedantry, that the fine, if insisted on, would ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... his head sadly. "I know Halle," said he. "You call it the seat of the Muses. I know it only as the seat of pedantry. You will soon know and confess this. There is nothing more narrow- minded, jealous, arrogant, and conceited than a Halle professor. He sees no merit in any thing but himself and a few old dusty Greeks and Romans, and even these are only great ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... inaugurated the new age after the Revolution had only been an English conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force—by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... sorts of things-shame, disgrace, and ruin!—only because she don't understand the quality of our morality-that's all! There's no harm, after all, in these little enjoyments-if the girl would only understand them so. Our society is free from pedantry; and there-no damage can result where no one's the wiser. It's like stealing a blush from the cheek of beauty-nobody misses it, and the cheek continues as beautiful as ever." Thus philosophizes the chivalric gentleman, until he falls into ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... McCullenan and Cuan O'Lochain, the gr-r-reat Irish histhorians." The boy was evidently accustomed to the priest's Celtic pleasantries. A little, appreciative grin was all the attention the insinuation of pedantry received. ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... is not recorded that Jesus was even once interfered with by the civil power, in his wandering career. Such freedom, and, above all, the happiness which Galilee enjoyed in being much less confined in the bonds of Pharisaic pedantry, gave to this district a real superiority over Jerusalem. The revolution, or, in other words, the belief in the Messiah, caused here a general fermentation. Men deemed themselves on the eve of the great renovation; the Scriptures, tortured into divers meanings, fostered ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of us, think that taste in art is an irrational mystery; they trust in the expert and usually in the wrong one, as the ignorant and superstitious trust in the wrong priest. For as religion is merely mischievous unless it is tested in matters of conduct, so taste is mere pedantry or frivolity unless it is tested on things of use. These have their sense or nonsense, their righteousness or unrighteousness, which anyone can learn to see for himself, and, until he has learned, he will be at ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... polished society in Naples, he met not only artists and archeologists, but men of letters and of affairs. Among these, he was peculiarly drawn to the two distinguished economists, the abate Galiani and the cavaliere Filangieri, in whose company he enjoyed for the first time sound learning unhampered by pedantry. The lively Galiani proved that social tastes and a broad wit are not incompatible with more serious interests; and Filangieri threw the charm of a graceful personality over any topic he discussed. In the latter, indeed, courtly, young and romantic, a thinker whose intellectual acuteness ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... vanity seduced, And soothed into a dream that he discerns The difference of a Guido from a daub, Frequents the crowded auction. Stationed there As duly as the Langford of the show, With glass at eye, and catalogue in hand, And tongue accomplished in the fulsome cant And pedantry that coxcombs learn with ease, Oft as the price-deciding hammer falls He notes it in his book, then raps his box, Swears 'tis a bargain, rails at his hard fate That he has ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Macready,[623] dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer,[624] the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Eisenberg; studied under Fichte and Schelling, and was himself lecturer successively in Jena, Dresden, Berlin, Goettingen, and Muenich, where he died; of the school of Kant, his work has suffered through the pedantry of his style; he wrote "The Ideal of Humanity," and many philosophical ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... founded on those general principles of good taste, good sense, and good-nature, which must succeed in all times, places, and seasons. His desire to please evidently arose not from vanity but benevolence. In his conversation, there was neither the pedantry of a recluse, nor the coxcombry of a man of the world: his knowledge was select; his wit without effort, the play of a cultivated imagination: the happiness of his expressions did not seem the result of care; and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... chilling limit imposed by the traditions of Confucian decorum; a certain degree of freedom and geniality is, in a word, for the first time and only for a brief interval infused into the intellectual expression of a nation hitherto closely cramped in the bonds of a narrow pedantry. It was at this period that the drama began to flourish, and the germs of the modern novelist's art made their first appearance. Among the works of imagination dating from the period in question which have come down to the present day there ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Richard Scott, was an accurate classical scholar, which perhaps accounts for his being, unlike some others of his profession, free from pedantry. He was kind-hearted and somewhat disposed to indolence, loving more to converse with one of my years than to instruct him in languages. He had seen a good deal of the world and its ways, and I learned much from him besides Greek and Latin. We were great friends and companions, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which he bore a good number, added a peculiar manliness to the air of his countenance. His capacity was good, and his disposition naturally frank and easy; but he had been a soldier from his infancy, and his education was altogether in the military style. He looked upon taste and letters as mere pedantry, beneath the consideration of a gentleman, and every civil station of life as mean, when compared with the profession of arms. He had made great progress in the gymnastic sciences of dancing, fencing, and riding; ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... shall not be reproached with either Pedantry or Vanity (though I deserve both) if, having begun so classically, I here introduce some verses which, when I was a boy at Harrow, my kind Head Master addressed to my Father. The occasion of these verses was that the recipient of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... most frequented, this disappointment of the imagination was far more than compensated by the frank, social, and engaging qualities, both of disposition and manner, which, on a nearer intercourse, he disclosed, as well as by that entire absence of any literary assumption or pedantry, which entitled him fully to the praise bestowed by Sprat upon Cowley—that few could ever discover he was a great poet by ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... smelted it all down in his fiery imagination. It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... past which usually is as deeply shrouded from us as the future. If at times we are reminded in reading Clarendon's Life of the old steward in Hogarth's plate, who lifts up his hands in horror over the extravagance of his master, if his pedantry often irritates, and his love of place displeases, we recognise these but as the shades of the character of a distinguished and accomplished public servant. But to Marvell Clarendon was rapacious, ambitious, and corrupt, a man who had sold Oliver's Dunkirk ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... though he was a poet, but he loved them the better because he was a poet. He seems to have been without taint of worldliness. London with its pomps and vanities, learned coteries with their dry pedantry, rather scared than attracted him. He found his prime glory in his genius, and his chief felicity in ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... flourishes his bauble, tosses that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asks questions and propounds conundrums that pedantry can never answer. Hence the ink-bottle, with its mark on the walls at Eisenach, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... a pedant, but his pedantry was disguised, therefore mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. His favorite topic was beauty and ugliness—and his abhorrence ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... a meaning to the masquerade of New York. In the hotel where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a Bohemian; and I am glad to say that he called himself a Bohemian. I have already protested sufficiently, before American audiences, against the pedantry of perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested to my American friends that the abandonment of the word Bohemian in its historical sense might well extend to its literary and figurative sense. We might be expected to say, 'I'm afraid Henry has got into very Czecho-Slovakian ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... foreigners, the tyrants of Rome, in a declamation or epistle, full of bold truths and absurd pedantry, in which he applies the maxims, and even prejudices, of the old republic to the state of the xivth century, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the happiness of your love!' he exclaimed. 'Forget that pedantry—always my fault. I cannot feel sure that my other motives will keep their force, but I know that this desire will be only stronger in ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... v. 36. Goldsmith, in his Present State of Polite Learning (ch. xi.), wrote in 1759:—'From a desire in the critic of grafting the spirit of ancient languages upon the English have proceeded of late several disagreeable instances of pedantry. Among the number, I think, we may reckon blank verse. Nothing but the greatest sublimity of subject can render such a measure pleasing; however, we now see it used upon the most trivial occasions.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... regard for disused metaphor savours of pedantry: disregard is inelegant. Write, not, "unparalleled complications," but "unprecedented complications;" and "he threw light on obscurities," instead of ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... animadversions are not uncalled for.—Thus, upwards of one hundred pages are devoted to the Festival Games and Amusements of the Jews, Greeks, and Romans, meanly as Mr. Smith talks of "learned lore and antiquarian pedantry." Then follow twenty-two pages on, not of, Modern Festivals, &c.: from thence we quote two pages ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given community. I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous stories of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spectacles are not more prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays; the little ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... given by Reuchlin[602] to his little kinsman Schwartzerd, because the world has adopted it: but he will none of Capnio, the name which Reuchlin fitted on to himself, because the world has not adopted it. He calls the old forms pedantry: but he sees that the rejection of well-established results of pedantry would be greater pedantry still. The paradoxers assume the question that it is more correct to sound a man by lame imitation of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... not those ingenious and elaborate conceits in which Petrarch, great Poet though he be, has so often mistaken pedantry for passion, that absorbed at that moment the attention of the beautiful Nina. Her eyes rested not on the page, but on the garden that stretched below the casement. Over the old fruit-trees and hanging ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... agreeably surprised to find him one of the most witty, well-informed, and agreeable young men I have ever seen. Gay without levity, well-read without pedantry, and good-looking without vanity. Of how few young men of fashion could this be said! But I am persuaded that Count Charles de Mornay is made to be something better than ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... for any purposes of common interest on the same conditions. That is, they may form associations. Yet at bottom the powers of an association are something very different from the powers of the individuals composing it; and it is only by legal pedantry that the attempt can be made to regulate the behaviour of an association on principles derived from and suitable to the relations of individuals. An association might become so powerful as to form a state within the state, and to contend ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... songs of the fairies[97] (in Act iii.), if not written by Lilly, were at least suggested by the fairies' song in Endymion. It would be hard to say what Lilly might not have achieved if he had not stultified himself by his detestable pedantry: his songs (O si sic omnia) are hardly to be matched ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... dined at the Duke de Lauzun's with Governor Trumbull. This good methodical governor is seventy years old. His whole life is consecrated to business, which he passionately loves, whether it is important or not. He has all the simplicity and pedantry of a great magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... no heed unto me— Nay, that graceless little boy Coolly plotted to undo me— With his songs of tender joy; And my pedantry o'erthrown, Eager was I to employ His sweet ritual for ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... this day it is nearly impossible for an American to get a Korean "frog in the well"[8] to understand why the genuine native life and history, language and learning of his own peninsular country is of greater value to the student than the pedantry borrowed from China. Why these possess any interest to a "scholar" is a mystery to the head in the horsehair net. Anything of value, he thinks, must be on the Chinese model. What is not Chinese is foolish and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... be worth while to note that the "people" in this case meant only a majority of the electors, whose wish is notoriously opposed to the ardent desire of a respectable minority; and it might be well to suggest that the constitutional pedantry which refuses to "go behind an electoral return," i.e., to see things as they are, is not the same thing as either good sense or statesmanship. But for the present purpose it is better to admit that the majority of the inhabitants of Ireland would, ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... need to follow out every line in the standing rigging even, in order to paint a ship properly. To do this would miss the spirit of it, and make the thing rigid and lifeless. But ignorance will not take the place of pedantry for all that. Every kind of vessel has its own peculiar structure, its own peculiar proportions, and its own peculiar arrangement of spar and rigging. Whether you are complete or not in the detailing of the masts and rigging, you must know and represent the true character ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air of good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and the habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness which was not pedantic,—though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of premature gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-tints, though without color, and relieved by a small ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... besides, in prudery, a certain pedantry which is pleasing to women. The coquette and the pedant are neighbours. Their kinship is visible in the fop. The subtile is derived from the sensual. Gluttony affects delicacy, a grimace of disgust conceals cupidity. And then woman feels her weak point guarded by all that casuistry of gallantry ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... terror of Bengal, the scourge of the native population, the screen of European delinquents, a convenient tool of the Government for all purposes of evil, an insurmountable obstacle to the Government in all undertakings for the public good; that its proceedings were made up of pedantry, cruelty, and corruption; that its disputes with the Government were at one time on the point of breaking up the whole fabric of society; and that a convulsion was averted only by the dexterous policy of Warren Hastings, who ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... my father, familiarly, "you son would know that though a scholar is often a fool, he is never a fool so supreme, so superlative, as when he is defacing the first unsullied page of the human history by entering into it the commonplaces of his own pedantry. A scholar, sir,—at least one like me,—is of all persons the most unfit to teach young children. A mother, sir,—a simple, natural, loving mother,—is the infant's true ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... still to some extent swayed by its influence (at one and the same time both Christian and chivalrous, Pagan and precociously cynical; yet charmingly fresh, unspoiled by dogma, uncontaminated by pedantry)—these first endeavours of the Romantic spirit to assimilate the Classic mannerism could not create a new style representative of the national life. They had the fault inherent in all hybrids, however fanciful and graceful. They were sterile and unprocreative. The ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... English of Johnson in terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity and ronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor as vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived. It was none the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed myself to it with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long after I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which of course you will do, you will find we disdain no pursuit worthy of thinking beings. We pass from music to literature—to science—even to philosophy; but we do this—I pray you to believe—without pedantry and without leaving the tone of familiar converse. Sometimes we read verses, but we never make them; we love the ancients and do not fear the moderns: we only fear those who would lower the mind and debase the heart. We love the past while we render justice ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... consecutive tale of her misadventures; but she continued instead to pour forth the most extraordinary mixture of the correct school miss and the poor untutored little piece of womanhood in a false position—of engrafted pedantry and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps—the commonest pattern certainly in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those places and occasions when morality is sought as an end—is a clean and able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies, temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry, and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but not adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to his wife and children, and kind without extravagance to ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... was furious and said more than he meant to. With a resolute air Shigalov took three steps towards him. "Since yesterday evening I've thought over the question," he began, speaking with his usual pedantry and assurance. (I believe that if the earth had given way under his feet he would not have raised his voice nor have varied one tone in his methodical exposition.) "Thinking the matter over, I've come to the conclusion ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... night as he sat over Examination papers, his sensitive imagination framed the accusations of selfishness, pedantry, scrupulosity, which his wife might be bringing against him in the "sessions of silent thought;" although it was clearly to her advantage as much as to his own that he should keep out of money difficulties and do work which counted. She had no fixed habits, and he flung down pipe and pen, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... literature. His pictures of the infancy of Jupiter, of the deserted Ariadne, of the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, have no elaborate realism in detail. The Royal Academy walls showed, in those days, plenty of marble halls, theatres, temples, and classic groves, reproduced with soulless pedantry. Watts gave us heroic figures, with strong masses and flowing lines, simply grouped and charged with emotion—the yearning love of Diana for Endymion, the patient resignation of Ariadne, the passionate regret of Orpheus, the cruel bestiality of the Minotaur. Some will find a deeper ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... art which is, so to speak, always literal,—art in which a jest is a jest and serious things are treated with familiar directness, and all, whether in jest or earnest, is primarily beautiful. In Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan Bach answers the critics who censured him for his pedantry and provincial ignorance of the grand Italian operatic style, by making effective use of that style in Pan's prize-aria ("Zum Tanze, zum Sprunge, so wack-ack-ack-ackelt das Herz"), nobly representing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... more good-natured man or a more pleasant one never, I believe, existed. The loss is not only a private one to his friends, but really a public one to society in general."* Gaiety of temperament and sound sense, a quick wit and a kind heart, sincerity and love of society, culture without pedantry, a capacity to enjoy the world in each stage of life: these are seldom found united in one individual as they were in George Selwyn, and he is thus for us perhaps the pleasantest personality of English society in ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Adams was conscious of having been born an eighteenth-century remainder. As he grew older, he found that Early Institutions lost their interest, but that Early Women became a passion. Without understanding movement of sex, history seemed to him mere pedantry. So insistent had he become on this side of his subject that with women he talked of little else, and — because women's thought is mostly subconscious and particularly sensitive to suggestion — he tried ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of the empyrean heavens, and whether, with Strabo, we may dare assume that ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;—in the old ship's captain, the old head of a factory, the old master of hounds; and we do not blame them for it. It is a disease incident to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness to that of an attorney. But it is most dangerous in the greatest minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as by us, each in our place, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... stump speakers, pamphleteers, think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for two reasons—because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... thoughtlessly sustained and confirmed by the unconscionable literary perverseness of Irishmen themselves, who have preferred the easy task of concocting humorous extravaganzas, which caricature with merciless exaggeration the pedantry, bombast, and blunders incident to the lowest order of Hibernian ballads, to the more pleasurable and patriotic duty of collecting together the many, many specimens of genuine poetic feeling, which have ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... state not calculated for a sick bed. Gives a short journal of what had passed relating to the lady since his last. Mr. Brand inquires after her character and behaviour of Mrs. Smith. His starchedness, conceit, and pedantry. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... evidence, the examination closed, and the argument to the jury commenced. The solicitor very briefly adverted to the leading facts, deprecated any attempt to turn the case into ridicule, admitted that the witness was a man of eccentricity and pedantry, but harmless and inoffensive; a man, evidently, of conscientiousness and respectability; that he had shown himself to be a peaceable man, but when occasion demanded, a brave man; that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him upon no cause except an independence, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... We sat down after dinner under some trees in the village, and Mr. de began reading the Gazette to the farmers who were about us. In a few minutes every thing that could hear (for I leave understanding the pedantry of a French newspaper out of the question) were his auditors. A party at quoits in one field, and a dancing party in another, quitted their amusements, and listened with undivided attention. I believe in general the farmers ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... sickness thou wast wont to carry so many, Gypsy and Gentile, in thy cart of the tinkling bell? Oft in the reunions of the lettered and learned in this land of universal literature, when weary of the display of pedantry and egotism, have I recurred with yearning to our Gypsy recitations at the old house in the Pila Seca. Oft, when sickened by the high-wrought professions of those who bear the cross in gilded chariots, have ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... he is really vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art. Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Pagodas, Palaces, Pao-ch'eng, locality, Paper, invention of, Paranymphs, Pass, frontier, Paterfamilias, Patriarchal rule, Peace Conference, "Pechelee" Gulf, Pedantry, Pedigree, Peh K'i, General, Peking, modern, Peking plain, Pelasgi, People, the, Period, Protector, "Perpendicular and Horizontal" Period, Persia, Persian civilization, Personal causes of war, Personal names, Philosophy, Phoenicians, Physicians, Pigs, ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... names are unpronounceable even by Europeans, what would the poor Hindu malee make of them? The pedantry of some of our scientific Botanists is something marvellous. One would think that a love of flowers must produce or imply a taste for simplicity and nature in ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Nickleby goes to an old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending of little Paul to Dr. Blimber's is a real part of the history of little Paul, such as it is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly pedantry in order to show up Paul's childishness. Dickens deliberately invents all that rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul's predestination and tragedy. Dotheboys Hall is not meant to show up anything except Dotheboys ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... atheists abound in novels, but it is to the credit of Sir Walter Scott that wherever he has introduced a sincere character of this description, he has gone to the very origin for his facts, and then given us the result without pedantry. The four which I have examined are each a curious subject for study, and indicate, collectively and compared, a train of thought which I believe that few have suspected in Scott, notwithstanding his well-known great love for the curious and occult in literature. That he perfectly understood that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... than the Pope speaking ex cathedra, as I always did? Is the Church to frame herself after the prescriptions of heathen philosophers and profane jurists? How, then, shall she be terrible as an army with banners? Did I concern myself with such pedantry when the Kings of Spain and Portugal came to me like cats suing for morsels, and I gave them the West ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... keeps up business appearances by driving several horses, or joins influential societies. He may make a great display in style, manner, dress, pretensions, writing for the newspapers, exhibiting literary pedantry, referring to the superior facilities afforded by some particular school or society to which he belongs; or by editing and publishing a medical journal, ostensibly for the advancement of medical science, but practically to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... and in a way which produces harm. And it is shocking, to say the least, to see churches emptied and parishes thrown into war for the sake of such matters. The lightest word which can be used for such conduct is, pedantry; but I fear at times lest the Lord in heaven should be using a far more awful word, and when He sees weak brethren driven from the fold of the Church by the self- will and obstinacy of the very men who profess ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... look for new hypocrisies: declamations on virtue, diatribes on corruption, austerity of habits, etc. Last degree of pedantry! ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... eminence, and the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to their attention as "the immediate language ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... ANNA's golden days;[44] What only learning's aggregated toil Slowly accomplish'd in each foreign soil.[45] Yet to the mine though the rich coin he trace, No current marks his early essays grace; For in each page we find a massy store Of English bullion mix'd with Latian ore: In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin'd, He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;[46] In scientifick phrase affects to smile, Form'd on Brown's turgid Latin-English style:[47] Too oft the abstract decorates his prose,[48] While measur'd ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... his simplicity, his evangelical purity of mind are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and the habit of athletic ... exercise ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the muse of fiction. Like Don Quixote, parson Adams is beaten a little too much and too often, but the cudgel lights upon his shoulders ... without the slightest ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... is both metrical and rhythmical, equally free from the confused strains of unmoulded genius and from the servile pedantry of conventional rules. The verse of eight syllables is the source of all other metres, and the sloka or double distich is the stanza most frequently used. Though this poetry presents too often extravagance of ideas, incumbrance of episodes, and monstrosity ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and guileless that she doesn't resent my pedantry. I love giving information, you know," Augustine smiled. He looked about him as he spoke, at birds and trees and clouds, happy, humorous, clasping his riding crop behind his back so that his mother heard it make a pleasant little click against ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... years of the sixteenth century continued the manner of the so-called rhetoriqueurs, who endeavoured to maintain allegory, now decrepit or effete, with the aid of ingenuities of versification and pedantry of diction; or else they carried on something of the more living tradition of Villon or of Coquillard. Among the former, Jean le Maire de Belges deserves to be remembered less for his verse than for his prose work, Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... any meaning—on the 'giants of the seventeenth century,' and especially upon Sir Thomas Browne. Johnson's taste, in fact, had led him to the study of writers in many ways congenial to him. His favourite book, as we know, was Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' The pedantry of the older school did not repel him; the weighty thought rightly attracted him; and the more complex structure of sentence was perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... deliberation.' This vice of affectation in all its kinds, and the ways of avoiding it, are discussed with a delicacy of insight which would do credit to a Chesterfield of the present century, sending forth his son into society for the first time. Castiglione goes so far as to condemn the pedantry of far-fetched words and the coxcombry of elaborate costumes, as dangerous forms of affectation. His courtier must speak and write with force and freedom. He need not be a purist in his use of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... when he was buried. Another version of the story is, that a spurious skull was foisted upon Rawlinson, who died happy in the possession of the doubtful treasure. Rawlinson was bantered by Addison for his pedantry, in one of the Tatlers, and was praised by Dr. Johnson for ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... exquisite military combinations cannot remove, which the most perfectly served artillery cannot sweep away, before which all the bayonets, and gunpowder, and lines of fortification in the world are useless—and compared with which the science of the commander is pedantry, and strategy but a word. They will discover that something more than mechanical power, however great—something more than the skill of the practised officer, or the instinct of well-trained soldiers, are requisite for success—where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... is ample testimony that he appreciated the main classical authors whom he read in the gymnasium at Cassel; but it was refreshing to hear and to read various utterances of his against gerund-grinding and pedantry. He recognizes the fact that the worst enemies of classical instruction in Germany, as, indeed, elsewhere, have been they of its own household, and he has stated this view as vigorously as did Sydney Smith in England and Francis Wayland in America. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... with rectitude of articulation and force of emphasis of which I had entertained no conception previously to my knowledge of him. Notwithstanding the uncouthness of his garb, his manners were not unpolished. All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation. He uttered no sentiment calculated to produce a disadvantageous impression; on the contrary, his observations denoted a mind alive to every generous and heroic feeling. They were introduced without parade, and accompanied ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... prince, either to sneer at the poor old whiteheaded courtier he has murdered, or taunt the little trusting girl he has taught to love him. If it were not for the name of Shakspeare, Hamlet would be set down as nearly the beau-ideal of a snob—a combination of the pedantry of James and the unmanliness of Buckingham. Read the play, with this key to the character, and you will find it quite as true to nature as in the laborious glosses of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... of precision he imagined it possible to attain in discerning them, or to what extent their names were merely convenient handles for certain types which he had chosen aesthetically. To us to-day this classification is merely a trace of an obsolete pedantry, which it would be a vain curiosity to attempt to follow with the object of identifying ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in "Waverley," he advances to between fifty and sixty in "Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters' was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... convinced that you are still what the world calls an upright man of business, but I do not know whether you have preserved that proudly pure integrity, which, alas! many in the mercantile world treat as mere pedantry, and to have to tell you this makes ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... metaphysical subject and diffuse style were not calculated to engross the general taste. Johnson had taken possession of the field of satire, but there are too many readers of enthusiastic mind to be satisfied with satire. The pedantry and uncouthness of Walter Harte had precluded him from ever being a favourite with the public; Shenstone had not yet risen into fame; and Lyttelton was engrossed by politics. When, therefore, Collins's Odes appeared, all speculation ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... chemical identity, or resemblance in aspect. I do not mean to talk of fat in seeds, nor of flour in eggs, nor of milk in rocks. Pace my prelatical friends, I mean to use the word 'Alb' for vegetable albumen; and although I cannot without pedantry avoid {253} using sometimes the word 'milky' of the white juices of plants, I must beg the reader to remain unaffected in his conviction that there is a vital difference between liquids that coagulate into butter, or congeal into India-rubber. Oil, when used simply, will always ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... me in my uncle most strongly was his blunt contempt of the modern pedantry in State, Church, and School, to which he gave vent with some humour. Despite the great moderation of his usual views on life, he yet produced on me the effect of a thorough free-thinker. I was highly delighted by his contempt for the pedantry of the schools. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... official of the town. Incidentally he poetized in the inflated and ornate style which has given the so-called second Silesian school its evil reputation. His work is decidedly vacuous as poetry, but has its interest as indicating the literary drift of the age of puffs, powder, and pedantry. The selections follow Bobertag's edition in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... only to look over the lists of the Faculties and teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme authority ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... true that it was on the side of Art alone that this enlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowly enough at first—e.g. Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged, as in the Antiquary, to apologize to pedantry for his instinctive love of Gothic architecture. And no less true is it that follies enough were mingled with the really useful and healthful birth of romanticism in Art and Literature. But at last the study of facts by men who were neither artistic nor sentimental came to the help of that first ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... your mind to it, for it cannot be otherwise. You are now, and will be still more, the concentric focus of every high endeavour, high feeling, and honest effort in art. This is my true conviction, without pedantry and charlatanism, both of which I abhor. Do not fail to use your powerful influence with C., so that he may exert his faculties with some consistency and regularity. I spoke to him of B.'s plan of an Art Review. If you set him tasks, he may ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... of us had had reason to suspect—at least we had had hopes—that the pedantry in Mr. M—— was somewhat superimposed, that he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the very thought ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... this kingdom above ten thousand persons, whose revenues added to those of my lords the bishops, would suffice to maintain two hundred young gentlemen of wit and pleasure, and freethinking,—enemies to priestcraft, narrow principles, pedantry, and prejudices; who might be an ornament to the court and town; and then again, so great a body of able (bodied) divines might be a recruit ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Rome that something of the Italian feeling for the old Roman culture and institutions was felt by the humanists of France. In Germany and England no such feeling existed, and in these countries any effort to discredit the rising native languages was much more likely to be regarded as mere pedantry. In both these countries, though, Latin was still the language of the Church, of the universities, of all learned writing, and the means of international intercourse, and after the new humanism had once obtained a foothold it was welcomed by scholars ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... astonished—and resentful—at every new discovery, but in a short time accepts it as a commonplace. The layman resents all new ideas, but the adjustment of the human mind to the inevitable is common even among savages." Her slight affectation of pedantry was very well done and Clavering could not detect the flicker of a lash as her eyes rested indulgently ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... thinking of her last interview with him, when she descanted at length on that superfluity of naughtiness and Biblical pedantry which, she asserted, made Scottish ministers preach ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... hands that it had been a great mistake of the various governments not to have resisted sooner; and the liberals and radicals (the name as perhaps you may know of the more democratically inclined part of the ruling classes) were much blamed for having led the world to this pass by their mis-timed pedantry and foolish sentimentality: and one Gladstone, or Gledstein (probably, judging by this name, of Scandinavian descent), a notable politician of the nineteenth century, was especially singled out for reprobation ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... his plan, which he lays, pursues, and at last executes, being the subject of the poem. From all which considerations I impartially conclude that the ancients had their excellencies and their defects, their virtues and their vices, just like the moderns: pedantry and affectation of learning clearly decide in favour of the former; vanity and ignorance, as peremptorily, in favour of the latter. Religious prejudices kept pace with my classical ones; and there was a time when I thought it impossible for the honestest ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... businesse, whereof a man has not infallible Science to proceed by; to forsake his own natural judgement, and be guided by generall sentences read in Authors, and subject to many exceptions, is a signe of folly, and generally scorned by the name of Pedantry. And even of those men themselves, that in Councells of the Common-wealth, love to shew their reading of Politiques and History, very few do it in their domestique affaires, where their particular ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance. She permitted me to make her two or three ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... poets, for many years past, were all overrun with pedantry. For, as I take it, the word is not properly used; because pedantry is the too frequent or unreasonable obtruding our own knowledge in common discourse, and placing too great a value upon it; by which definition, men of ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... without pedantry, good without severity, he was duly qualified to discharge the duties of the Christian and the Bishop. In the pulpit he enforced religion; in his conduct he exemplified it. The poor he assisted with his charity; the ignorant he blessed with his instruction. ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... to his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is less bookish than he; none insults his readers less with any parade, with any apparent consciousness of erudition; and he wears his learning so lightly that pedants have even accused him of lacking it because he lacks pedantry. His stream, to resume the simile, carries in solution more reading as well as more wit, more knowledge of life and nature, more gifts of almost all kinds than would suffice for twenty men of letters, yet the very power of its solvent force, as well ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury |
