"Pretension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foibles of a tiny German principality. Now, having changed all that, and having forced the Knickerbockers from their old places of vantage, the plutocrats reign supreme. To a mind capable of being saddened by human materialism, pretension, braggadocio, it is all very much the same sort of affair. Our republic should be ashamed of an aristocracy founded on either money or birth, and that thousands of its citizens are not only unashamed of such systems, but really glory in them, is merely another proof of how ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one but two. A republic supposes a high state of morals, but no such state of morals is possible without the habit of respect; and there is no respect without humility. Now the pretension that every man has the necessary qualities of a citizen, simply because he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to say that labor, merit, virtue, character, and experience are to count for nothing; and we destroy humility when we proclaim that a man becomes ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was, for one of the theatrical players is a lady lodger of ours. She was unfairly supplanted by some insignificant young upstart and, of course, the public, always knowing true talent from shallow pretension, broke up the seats and pelted the manager with it along ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... work may retain it. We may still feel that we have no right to judge severely of what was not, at first, intended to come before our judgement at all. This of course applies only to those compositions, which indicate, by something within themselves, this freedom from the pretension of authorship. And such are most of those to which we are now bespeaking ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... a leading part in the location and establishment of the Water Works. Anxious to effect an improvement in the business architecture of the city, in which Cleveland was so far behind cities of less pretension, he projected and carried on far towards completion the Case Block, which stands to-day the largest and most noticeable business building in the city, and which contains one of the finest public halls in the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... unconscious irony of this speech he was noticing the difference between the young English girl's evident interest in a political problem and the utter indifference of his own countrywomen. Here was a girl scarcely out of her teens, with no pretension to being a blue stocking, with half the aplomb of an American girl of her own age, gravely considering a question of political economy. Oddly enough, it added to his other irritation, and he ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... encouragement to be gained from a reliance on the ultimate victory of true principles. More than this can hardly be expected from me, even on the supposition that I have ascertained the real conditions. No one, it is to be presumed, will imagine that I can have any pretension of giving recipes for Literature, or of furnishing power and talent where nature has withheld them. I must assume the presence of the talent, and then assign the conditions under which that talent can alone achieve real success, no man is made a discoverer ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... of our residence at Benares we sometimes met these naked creatures in the streets; but for many years they have disappeared, as there is a magisterial order that they be flogged for their indecency, however loud may be their pretension of sanctity. At Allahabad there were many devotees with their tangled hair, besmeared bodies, and very scanty clothing—if what they had on could be called clothing. These are yet seen all over the country. The time has not yet come ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... sensible. And it will hardly be believed, that, by that means, there was less talking among the society Madame assembled together than elsewhere. Madame hated people who talked much, and took a remarkably cruel revenge upon them, for she allowed them to talk. She disliked pretension, too, and never overlooked that defect, even in the king himself. It was more than a weakness of Monsieur, and the princess had undertaken the amazing task of curing him of it. As for the rest, poets, wits, beautiful women, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... trust, yet his connection with her employers seemed to him undutiful towards his late rector. All that she saw of them reassured her. The family manners were full of well-bred good-humour, full of fun, with high intelligence, much real refinement, and no pretension. The father was the most polished, with the scholarly courtesy of the dignified clergyman; the mother was the most simple and caressing; the daughter somewhat uncouth, readily betraying both her feelings and her cleverness and ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will listen to the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being carried to the extreme, until we are associating ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... ascents and descents; and if he be out of sight—in a moment, through some secret aperture, he returns as quickly through another equally unseen passage. Upon an average, I set his bibliomaniacal peregrinations down at the rate of a full French league per day. It is the absence of all pretension and quackery—the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which he opens his well-charged battery of information upon you—but, more than all, the glorious honours which are due to him, for having assisted to rescue the book treasures of the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres from destruction, during ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... less. If before drawing his map the traveller were to go to some working lithographer and witness the process, and make two or three experiments in a small way, he would naturally succeed all the better. A map drawn on a large scale, though without any pretension to artistic skill, with abundance of profile views of prominent landmarks, and copious information upon the routes that were explored, written along their sides, would be of the utmost value to future travellers, and ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... original documents, which is the essence of Protestantism. In Puritanism, reverence for the Scriptures is exaggerated to the point of superstition. The doctrine that God of old had spoken by holy men was supplemented by the pretension that God had long ago ceased so to speak and never would so speak again. The claim that the Scriptures contain a sufficient guide to moral duty and religious truth was exorbitantly stretched to include the last details of church organization and worship, and the minute direction ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the British nobleman with some curiosity. Evidently Lord Bedford was no dude. His suit was of rough cloth and ill-fitting. He was barely five feet six inches in height, with features decidedly plain, but with an absence of pretension that was creditable to him, considering that he was really what he purported to be. Stuyvesant walked by his side, nearly a head taller, and of more distinguished bearing, though of plebeian extraction. His manner was exceedingly deferential, and he was praising England and everything English ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... porticoes. It was a comfortable, sensible-looking place, however, such as were planned some eighty or a hundred years since, by men who had fortune enough to do as they pleased, and education enough to be quite superior to all pretension. The house was a low, irregular, wooden building, of ample size for the tastes and habits of its inmates, with broad piazzas, which not only increased its dimensions, but added greatly to the comfort and pleasure of the family ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... offered to us; we must receive it as a gift, and it must come into us before we can be in it. The point of comparison between the recipients of the kingdom and little children does not lie in any sentimental illusions about the innocence of childhood, but in its dependence, in its absence of pretension, in its sense of clinging helplessness, in its instinctive trust. All these things in the child are natural, spontaneous, unreflecting, and therefore of no value. You and I have to think ourselves back to them, and to work ourselves back to them, and to fight ourselves back ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man may ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Lady de la Paule confessed. "Not the least pretension, and her clothes are marvellous. You are abominably severe, Etta. I am quite sure if she wanted to she could succeed in ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... of wealth a bitterer as well as more pardonable struggle in England than on the Continent, is the unequal and capricious distribution of family property.... Country gentlemen and professional men,—nay, men without the pretension of being gentlemen,—are scarcely less smitten with the mania of creating 'an eldest son' to the exclusion and degradation of their younger children; and by the individuals thus defrauded by their nearest and dearest, is the idolatry of ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... pearls, and holding Talleyrand's hand, she entered the great reception hall, in which the foreign ambassadors, the generals, and the high dignitaries of the republic were gathered. She came without pretension or ostentation, but at her appearance a murmur of admiration ran through the company, and brought on her cheeks the timid blush of a young maiden. With the assurance of an accomplished lady of the world she received the salutations of the ambassadors, knew how to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... differences in culture and, more especially, in religious insight and understanding that exist between the ruder peoples and ourselves. In view of our common hope, and our common want of knowledge, I would rather identify religion with a general striving of humanity than with the exclusive pretension of any one people or sect. Who knows, for instance, the final truth about what happens to the soul at death? I am quite ready to admit, indeed, that some of us can see a little farther into a brick wall than, say, Neanderthal ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Societies. He is tall and well made. His vast and well-developed forehead announces the power of his intellect. His voice is full and sonorous. His attitude is dignified, and his gesticulation is full of noble simplicity. He is a man of lofty reason, natural, and without pretension, always master of himself, brilliant in the art of exposing and of abstracting. Few persons can handle a subject with which they are familiar better than Mr. Douglass. There is a kind of eloquence issuing from the depth of the soul, as from a spring, rolling along its copious floods, sweeping ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... antithesis, alliteration, paronomasia; figurativeness &c (metaphor) 521. flourish; flowers of speech, flowers of rhetoric; frills of style, euphuism^, euphemism. big-sounding words, high-sounding words; macrology^, sesquipedalia verba [Lat.], Alexandrine; inflation, pretension; rant, bombast, fustian, prose run mad; fine writing; sesquipedality^; Minerva press. phrasemonger; euphuist^, euphemist. V. ornament, overlay with ornament, overcharge; smell of the lamp. Adj. ornament ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... stop for a moment to check my reader from any erroneous conclusions. Because I have had occasion incidentally to speak of various patrician friends, it must not be supposed that I have myself any pretension to rank and high blood. I thank God that I have not. I am the son of a plain English merchant, esteemed during his life for his great integrity, and strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... his vehemence became so great as to make him overbearing and unjust. This was apt to happen in cases of pretension and any kind of wrong-doing. Mr. Adams was very impatient of cant, or of opposition to any of his deeply established convictions. Neither was his indignation at all graduated to the character of the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... very seldom seeing the face of either the one or the other. And yet, even under these circumstances, the weather, for some days past, could not be called very cold. It, however, had not the least pretension to be called summer weather, according to my ideas of summer in the northern hemisphere, as far as 60 deg. of latitude, which is nearly as far ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Cousin. "Mysticism is the pretension to know God without intermediary, and, so to speak, face to face. For Mysticism, whatever is between God and us hides Him from us." "Mysticism consists in substituting direct inspiration for indirect, ecstasy for reason, rapture ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... p. 90. The subsequent quotations are from the same source but I have sometimes slightly modified them and compared them with the original, though I have no pretension ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... familiar to all who have had any experience in the judicial investigation of truth, it must be assumed that if Austria had in its secret archives any documentary evidence that would justify it in its pretension that it had been unjustly assailed by one or more of the Powers with which it is now at war, it would have published such documents to the world in its own exculpation. The moral responsibility for this war ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... which we have constructed to the test of new facts,—by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound. Proceeding thus,—patiently,—diligently,—candidly,—we may hope to form a system as far inferior in pretension to that which we have been examining and as far superior to it in real utility as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every malady and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... any such pretension; and having expressed my appreciation of the anecdote, I moved to the door as the stately lady resumed ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the idea of an independent and peculiar Albanian race and nationality is shown to be false by ethnological research and by historical documents, it is a still greater error and a ridiculous pretension to say that the town of Jannina is the centre and the capital of the Albanian idea and nationality. This argument, which for some time past has been going the round of Europe, and which has found supporters in Italy,—in the Italian Government unfortunately,—is truly pitiable, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... little can be said. Many country houses are pleasing from their complete simplicity; plastered, and washed pink, yellow, or white, they are devoid of all architectural pretension, and their low roofs of red pantiles look much more natural than do the steep slated roofs of some of the more ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... noteworthy work of art pleased the eye in this bare, strangely narrow room. The weapons and pieces of armour of the aged champion of the faith, which hung high above the window, made no pretension to beauty. Besides, the rays of the dim candle did not extend to them any more than to the valueless pictures of saints and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... prided himself on the fact that his playing was addressed rather to the hearts than to the sensitive ears of his audiences, and during his later years he adopted certain mannerisms by way of distracting attention from his somewhat imperfect performances. He never made any pretension to being a musician of the modern school, nor of any regularly recognised school of music, but his concert pieces were his own compositions, of no great merit, and he still more delighted his audiences by playing national ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... held; the fiscal set forth the right of the cabildo, and justified their government; but notwithstanding this the governor declared himself for the bishop of Troya, and displayed the [written] opinions mentioned above, with which he confirmed the former pretension of restoring ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... and women, both ministers and laymen, who have helped to make the Church what it is and especially those now living who receive the inheritance of the fathers and upon whose shoulders rest the responsibility of passing the work down to a new century." The editors disclaim pretension to scientific historical treatment. The work is rather biographical and autobiographical and was prepared under such a handicap that some of the matter presented could not be verified. Yet when we consider ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... committee, Sir William Stawell, and it appears to have been backed up by those kind of general testimonials as to ability which recommend a man almost equally for any grade or position. Of special aptitude or scientific training he possessed no pretension, and his selection was a fatal blunder. In saying this, there is no reflection on the private character of the mistaken leader; he paid for the wrong estimation he held of his own fitness with his life, and the fault rests with those who placed ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... should learn from it, that though he has preached against "good works," it was against such as are falsely so called and as contribute toward the confusion of consciences, because they are self-elected, do not flow from faith, and are done with the pretension of doing ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... upon one of those initial irrationalities in the world theories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality in things, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value of any experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the value which that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is to compare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendental isolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lying side by side ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... those functions through courtesy, and for just considerations—the viceroy undertakes to appoint men to those places, refusing to understand as he ought what your Majesty has ruled and ordered in this matter. On the contrary, in order to establish himself in this pretension, he has suppressed the appointments that I sent last year. Indeed, although he deprived Don Fernando de Ayala of his appointment, he did not make another appointment, but said that he was satisfied for that time with that act of jurisdiction. He said that he would send me another as commander ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... following pages makes no pretension to authorship. He is deeply conscious that many defects characterize his production; and he hopes that they will be treated with the consideration which so candid an avowal merits, and which the ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... the Eclectic Institute, was not a place of any pretension. It was scarcely a village, but rather a hamlet. Yet the advantages which the infant institution offered drew together a considerable number of pupils of both sexes, sons and daughters of the Western Reserve farmers, inspired with a genuine love of learning, and too sensible to waste their ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... teacher. He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of all manner of shams, an equally intense love for every kind of manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type. He had an eye for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have been the first to laugh at the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... little river that flows westward, emptying its tribute into the vast expanse of Lake Michigan. Now, this river has already become known, by its villages and farms, and railroads and mills; but then, not a dwelling of more pretension than the wigwam of the Indian, or an occasional shanty of some white adventurer, had ever been seen on its banks. In that day, the whole of that fine peninsula, with the exception of a narrow belt of country along the Detroit River, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the basis of all Talmudic and Cabalistic writings, be regarded as of purely Jewish origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part in the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over like the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the angel Douma ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... the story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wide-eyed to the ever-fresh story of their father's marvellous adventures. The wholesome morality, the charitableness and homely piety apparent throughout, give the narrative a charm denied to many works of greater literary pretension. When Peter Wilkins leaves his solitary home to live among the winged people, the interest of the story, it must be confessed, is somewhat diminished. The author's obligations to Swift in the latter part of the book ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... traced the genealogy of the Merovingians, their claim to the discovery was disputed by Hadr. Valesius, the historiographer to the French Court, who was of course jealous that any one else should know more about the origins of the French monarchy than he did. His pretension, however, was easily refuted by Henschenius, who showed that he had himself discovered this derelict king twelve years before Valesius turned his thoughts to the subject, having published in 1654 a dissertation upon him distinct from those embodied in the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Waite, Dr. Wynn Westcott, and Mr. Cadbury Jones—are the work of men claiming or believing themselves to be initiated into Rosicrucianism or other occult systems of a kindred nature and as such in possession of peculiar and exclusive knowledge. This pretension may at once be dismissed as an absurdity; nothing is easier than for anyone to make a compound out of Jewish Cabalism and Eastern theosophy and to label it Rosicrucianism, but no proof whatever exists of any affiliation between the self-styled Rosicrucians of to-day and the seventeenth-century ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... affectations about Burns, as when he talks big in his diary of observing character and finding this pursuit the greatest entertainment of his life in Edinburgh, with a pretension very general among half-educated persons: but there is no reason to believe that he was not quite genuine about his predecessors. A poet is not necessarily a critic; and Allan Ramsay's fame had been exactly of the popular kind which would ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... said he, taking one of her hands. "It is a house I hope you will like. I like it, though it has no pretension whatever. It is an old house; and the ground belonging to it has been in the possession of my family for a hundred years; the house itself is not quite so old. But the trees about it are. The old house stands shut up and ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... semejante pretension excito sucesivamente la resistencia del centinela, las risas de los ordenanzas 10 y las dudas y vacilaciones de los edecanes[1-4] antes de llegar a conocimiento del Excelentisimo Sr. D.[1-5] Eugenio Portocarrero, conde del Montijo, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... themselves M. and Mme. Balzac. Occasionally, however, as early as 1822, in letters to his sister Honore insists on the particle "de," and all his life he claimed to be a member of a very old Gaulish family—a pretension which gave his enemies a ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... in the apartments. You must think that this was a fresh cause of chagrin, and created me more enemies. There are certain families who look upon the court as their hereditary domain: the Noailles was one of them. However, there is no grounds of pretension to such a right. Their family took its rise from a certain Adhemar de Noailles, of Toulouse, ennobled, according to all appearance, by the exercise of his charge in 1459. The grandfather of these Noailles was a domestic ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... them which we must call incorrect, in the present state of our knowledge. But, as Hoefer says in his Histoire de la Chimie, "to jeer at [the alchemical] theory is to commit at once an anachronism and an injustice.... Unless the world should finish to-morrow, no one can have the pretension to suppose that our contemporaries have said the last word of science, and nothing will remain for our descendants to discover, no errors for them to correct, no theories for ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... be done while anything remains to be done. There is one point to which attention must be directed. No effort should be spared to castigate and blast the whole idea of property in man, which is the corner-stone of the rebel pretension, and the constant assumption of the partisans of slavery, or of its lukewarm opponents. Let this idea be trampled out, and there will be no sympathy with the rebellion; and there will be no such abomination as slave-hunting, which is beyond question the most execrable feature of slavery itself. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... medical treatment, so far as it made any pretension to methods of cure, was either purely empirical, or founded upon the one notion that descended from generation to generation from the earliest antiquity—that there was an excess of bile in the blood, and that it must be expelled ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... than under any of the direct attacks which were made upon him. Con Crawley, we are told, was of a bilious, saturnine constitution, even his talent being but the result of disease. These physical disadvantages, combined with an education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush in manhood as to sting in the cradle, and leading his overweening ambition to pursue its object by ways dark ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... this country, it is an entire novelty, quite new and unprecedented.[23] Many a Minister has said to the Crown, "My advice must be taken, and my measures must be adopted," but no Minister has ever yet held this language or advanced this pretension to either House of Parliament. However, it seems to be successful at present, and success will justify much. Whether it will tend to permanent strength or a steady conduct of public affairs, remains ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... the Renaissance, with its pretension and vanity, caused a check in all the arts—the effect of which we are still feeling" (Traite de Composition, p. 89. See also the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... interest is the darga, or tomb of a famous Mahommedan saint named Mayud-uddin. It is situated at the foot of the Taragarh mountain, and consists of a block of white marble buildings without much pretension to architectural beauty. To this place the emperor Akbar, with his empress, performed a pilgrimage on foot from Agra in accordance with the terms of a vow he had made when praying for a son. The large pillars ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for the crown, and concluded with the request that all present should acknowledge his claim as lord paramount. The Scottish nobles present, with the exception of those who were privy to Edward's designs, were filled with astonishment and dismay at this pretension, and declared their ignorance of any claim of superiority of the King of England over Scotland. The ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... those who knew her intimately could understand the cheerful and unintermitted self-denial which alone enabled her to make them. She did her work as far as possible out of sight, without noise or pretension. Her time, talents, and money were held not as her own, but a trust from the Eternal Father for the benefit of His suffering children. Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which she wore it. Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... illustration of the republican union of comfort with elegance which reigns through the whole establishment. The master of the mansion, perhaps an old and valued schoolfellow:—his wife, a well-bred, accomplished, and still beautiful woman—cordial, without vulgarity—refined, without pretension—and informed, without a shade of blue! Their children!... But my reader will complete the picture, and imagine, better than I can describe, how one of my temperament must suffer at quitting such a scene. At six o'clock on the dreaded morning, the friendly old butler knocks ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... with nearly lozenge-shaped lights, but all without foliations,) is a stone bearing the date of 1640. In the south wall of the tower of the same church (which is low, heavy, and clumsily built, without any pretension to architectural design) is a stone to denote the period of its erection, which bears the date of 1655. Pulpits, communion-tables, church chests, poor-boxes, and pewing of the latter part of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... only musician that ever delighted the ear of young or old in those days. I do not know that there was a piano in the Province. If there were any their number was so small that they could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Now, every house in the land with any pretension to the ordinary comforts of life has either a piano or a melodeon, and every farmer's daughter of any position can run over the keys with as much ease and effect as a city belle. Passing along one of our streets not long since, ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... and another noise of children. More sliding? Oh no! This is a sport of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy of joy and wonder! Oh what happy spectators! And what a happy performer! They admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the circle of the earth; And to thine eye the vast skies fall, Dire and satirical, On clucking hens and prating fools, On thieves, on drudges and on dolls. And thou shalt say to the Most High, "Godhead! all this astronomy, And fate and practice and invention, Strong art and beautiful pretension, This radiant pomp of sun and star, Throes that were, and worlds that are, Behold! were in vain and in vain;— It cannot be,—I will look again. Surely now will the curtain rise, And earth's fit tenant me surprise;— But the curtain doth not rise, And Nature ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... foot struck even with the corner of a tall brick residence of more pretension than its fellows the front door popped open, and a bawling negress clattered down the steps to the pavement. Some medley of words came from her mouth, addressed, like as not, to herself—the recourse of her race when alone and beset by evil. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... through the court-yard, and out at the gate, and down a narrow lane to the sea. Note. The sala goes sheer up to the top of the house; the ceiling being conical, and the little bedrooms built round the spring of its arch. You will observe that we make no pretension to architectural magnificence, but that we have abundance of room. And here I am, beholding only vines and the sea for days together. . . . Good Heavens! How I wish you'd come for a week or two, and taste the white ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns[37] and pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was a short street of private houses of very fair size and of a half-vanished pretension to gentility. We drove slowly through, and Leamy had no difficulty in pointing out the house wherein he had been paid five pounds for carrying a bag. At the end the cab turned the corner and stopped, while Hewitt wrote a short note to an ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... distinguished in the manner of their expression: "Empfindsamkeit" is "secret, unpretentious, laconic and serious;" the latter attracts attention, is theatrical, voluble, whining, vain. Thirdly, they are known by their fruits, in the one case by deeds, in the other by shallow pretension. In the latter part of his volume, Campe treats the problem of preventing the perverted form of sensibility ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... pretension that it demanded a tremendous physical effort, the dog emerged and stood shivering beneath the big hand which smoothed its back with ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ago that I thus became a member of the Twenty-first District Republican Association in the city of New York. The men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life. When I began to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association and the means of joining it, these men—and the big business men and lawyers also—laughed at me, and told me that politics were "low"; that the organizations ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... they make no pretension to the strength and pathos of the poem by the great Scottish Peasant, have a grace and simplicity of their own, for which they have ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept, couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... one came to a meadow, with a path across its gentle rise which led to the row of houses called Craven Hill. I do not think there were twenty in all, and some of them, such as Lord Ferrar's and the Harley House, were dwellings of some pretension. Even the most modest of them had pretty gardens in front and behind, and verandas and balconies with flowering creepers and shrubberies, and a general air of semi-rurality that cheated my poor mother with a make-believe effect ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and the last," i.e. Mohammed, who claimed (and claimed justly) to be the "Seal" or head and end of all Prophets and Prophecy. For note that whether the Arab be held inspired or a mere imposter, no man making the same pretension has moved the world since him. Mr. J. Smith the Mormon (to mention one in a myriad) made ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... intellectual, it has a high sporting interest; for its pursuit is as beset with difficulty and danger as grizzly bear hunting, yet the climate in which you carry on this pursuit—vile as it is—is warm, which to me is almost an essential of existence. I beg you to understand that I make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the threshold. "Ich weiss nicht all doch viel ist mir bekannt," as Faust said—and, like him after he had said it, I have ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the coachman: the ostler twitched the cloths from the leaders, and away went the "Nelson Slow and Sure," with as much pretension as if it had meant to do the ten miles in an hour. The pale gentleman took from his waistcoat pocket a little box containing gum- arabic, and having inserted a couple of morsels between his lips, he next drew forth a little thin volume, which from the manner ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... book treats the subject of pathology with a thoroughness lacking in many works of greater pretension. The illustrations—many of them original—are ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... symbols indicate, deistic and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says Professor ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... slightness of thy wit, for hadst thou aught of sense, thou hadst enquired of the beatings of the billows and the waftings of the winds. But wall it off from the waves and the surges of the sea and still the winds, and we will build thee the castle. Now as for thy pretension that thou wilt vanquish me, Allah forfend that such thing should befal, and the like of thee should lord it over us and conquer our realm! Nay, the Almighty hath given me the victory over thee, for that thou hast transgressed against me ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... solely employed in recommending ridiculous attachments to certain immaterial points, instead of discussing the proper criterion of human actions, and regulating the general conduct of mankind to one another on reasonable and equitable principles. Indeed, the only pretension of the Chinese to a more refined morality than their neighbours is founded, not on their integrity or beneficence, but solely on the affected evenness of their demeanour, and their constant attention to suppress all symptoms of passion and violence. But it must be considered, that hypocrisy ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... none of these local governments, even if administered with more regard to the just demands of other nations than they have been, would be permitted, in a spirit of Eastern isolation, to close the gates of intercourse on the great highways of the world, and justify the act by the pretension that these avenues of trade and travel belong to them and that they choose to shut them, or, what is almost equivalent, to encumber them with such unjust relations as would prevent ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... flag at her masthead, any vessel became thereby entitled to the immunity which belongs to American vessels, they might well be reproached with assuming a position which would go far towards shielding crimes upon the ocean from punishment; but they advance no such pretension, while they concede that, if in the honest examination of a vessel sailing under American colours, but accompanied by strongly-marked suspicious circumstances, a mistake is made, and she is found to be entitled to the flag she bears, but no injury is committed, and the conduct of the boarding ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... part of him becomes merely human; the supposed supernatural part grows into what we should call a God. The process is simple. Any particular medicine-man is bound to have his failures. As Dr. Frazer gently reminds us, every single pretension which he puts forth on every day of his life is a lie, and liable sooner or later to be found out. Doubtless men are tender to their own delusions. They do not at once condemn the medicine-chief as a fraudulent institution, but they ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Italy following after, eight of the tribunes publishing the bill, a consul putting the question at the centuriate assembly, all orders and individuals pressing it on, in fact, with all the forces at its command. Nor is it the case that I afterwards made any pretension, or am making any at this day, which can justly offend anyone, even the most malevolent: my only effort is that I may not fail either my friends or those more remotely connected with me in either active service, or counsel, or personal exertion. This course of life perhaps ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... we are told that Plato, the philosopher, laid the mimi of Sophron under his pillow, and they were found there after his death. But in general we may say, with truth, that it always discovered the meanness of its original, like a false pretension to nobility, in which the cheat is always discovered, through the concealment of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... unlike their contemporaries, the Pharaohs, rarely put forward any pretension to divinity. They contented themselves with occupying an intermediate position between their subjects and the gods. While the ordinary priest chose for himself a single deity as master, the priest-king exercised universal sacerdotal functions. He officiated for Merodach here below, and the scrupulously ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... vogue now, and in dramas dealing with life and society at the present date, the actors are understood to provide their own attire. Moreover, there is now little varying of the programme, and, in consequence, little demand upon the stock wardrobe of the playhouse. Still, when in theatres of any pretension, entertainments in the nature of spectacles or pantomimes are in course of preparation, there is much stir in the wardrobe department. There are bales of cloth to be converted into apparel for the supernumeraries, yards and yards of gauze ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... them sometimes respect, but oftener drew them under suspicion as sorcerers; the universal accusation that they augmented their horde by stealing children, subjected them to doubt and execration.... The pretension set up by these wanderers, of being pilgrims in the act of penance, although it... in many instances obtained them protection from the governments of the countries through which they travelled, was afterwards totally disbelieved, and they were considered as incorrigible rogues and vagrants.... A ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... millions of free men who would resent, as done to themselves, a recurrence of an attack on their old country. And there are, beyond question, three millions of former Irishmen, citizens to- day of the United States, on whom the glance of many an English statesman, with any just pretension to the name, must fall. Therefore do we say that now England ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... willing to praise than to blame. The better portion of men prefer to hear the praises even of strangers. Therefore censors are held to stricter account than eulogists. But a natural love of justice is continually at war with feelings of personal kindness. It is impossible to see insolent and vulgar pretension in noisy triumph, while real and unobtrusive merit is neglected. When we see a creature strutting in laurels that have been won by another, human nature—much as it has been abused—prompts us to grasp them from undeserving ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... its long and exposed frontier and its small and scattered population, was considered utterly indefensible and almost certain to be successfully occupied by the invading forces. There was not a town of one thousand souls in the whole of that province, and the only forts of any pretension were those on the Niagara frontier. Kingston was a fortified town of some importance in the eastern part of the province, but Toronto had no adequate means of defence. At the commencement of the war there were only fourteen hundred and fifty ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... and that he, the ex-emperor, ere the governor had been a week at St. Helena, condescended to insult him to his face by language so extravagantly, intolerably, and vulgarly offensive, as never ought, under any circumstances whatever, to have stained the lips of one who made any pretension to the character of a gentleman. Granting that Sir Hudson Lowe was not an officer of the first distinction—it must be admitted that he did no wrong in accepting a duty offered to him by his government; and that Napoleon was guilty, not only of indecorum, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... strike and certainly realized its danger to present government as well as its possibilities for Socialism, has, as Premier, evolved measures of repression against organizations of State employees more stringent than have been introduced in any country making the slightest pretension to ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... has the whole "matter and copy of the father—eye, nose, lip, the trick of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries have described old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New Inn, have all his image and superscription. But Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. Sir Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing character, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a "towering bravery" there is in his sensuality! he affects ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Cophta" and actually claimed the worship of his followers; declaring that the institution had been established by Enoch and Elias, and that he had been summoned by "spiritual" agencies to restore it to its pristine glory. In fact, this pretension, which influenced thousands upon thousands of believers, was one of the most daring impostures that ever saw the light; and it is astounding to think that, so late as 1780, it should, for a long time, have been entirely successful. The preparatory course of exercises for admission to the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... the tile-roofed town hall built of stone, the main street of Kisfalu contained only one edifice of any pretension, the manor or, as it is called in Hungary, "the castle" of Herr von Abonyi. It was really a very ordinary structure, only it had a second story, stood on an artificial mound, to which on both sides ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... pretension would be attended with serious results, invasive of the jurisdiction of this Government and highly dangerous to our citizens in foreign lands. Therefore I have denied it and protested against its attempted exercise as unwarranted by the principles of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the endeavour to raise France above the nations. The opportunity was afforded by the Thirty Years' War. All Europe was involved, the Protestant Powers uniting against the House of Habsburg, which, by tradition, by pretension, and by its actual position and power, was the one constant obstacle to the desired supremacy of the French king. Richelieu assisted them, and ended by openly joining them. Once he said, "I will prove to the world that the age of Spain ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of the place and nature of the buildings differ little from those of the generality of Malayan bazaars, excepting that its superior wealth has occasioned the erection of a greater number of public edifices, chiefly mosques, but without the smallest pretension to magnificence. The country above the town is highly cultivated, and abounds with small villages and groups of three or four houses, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... also a bookshop of small pretension in a town in Wales. For purely secular delight, maybe, it was too largely composed of Methodist sermons. Hell fire burned upon its shelves with a warmth to singe so poor a worm as I. Yet its signboard popped its welcome when I had walked ten miles of sunny road. Possibly ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... whole wretchedness, the whole Atheism as I call it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls 'happy'? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be 'happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... and all the more beautiful because of its rarity, is a purely guileless spirit! A crystalline medium through which the transparent light of Heaven comes and goes; open, candid, just, honorable, sincere; scorning every unfair dealing, every hollow pretension, every narrow prejudice. Wherever such characters exist, they are like "apples of gold ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... pounds per annum each. No doubt I might have sent them to a Board school, where they would have received a better education; but in the part of London where I lived there was no Board school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson |
