"Sententious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seriously—as he appears to be intended to be—as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,—the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret ...
— English Satires • Various
... to relax their grip even when one's reason is prepared to discard them as out-worn. I am not giving utterance in this sententious fashion to distrust in allopathy; I simply am thinking of the qualms which persisted in harrowing my soul as I gazed upon my very beautiful daughter, and tried to feel proud that she was endeavoring to do something useful. My associations with lovely women are so intimately ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... there can be in the narrative of a simple episode in the life of a humble fugitive. What reply can be made, what explanation can be offered? Fortunately, what remains to be told may mostly be put in the sententious language of Brother ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... of Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and the author seems to expect his readers to be prepared with more knowledge than, I ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... all that passed, though with Indian gravity and finesse he had sat with averted face, seemingly inattentive to a discourse in which he had no direct concern. Thus appealed to, however, he answered his friend in his ordinary sententious manner. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... "That is so sententious, Kenneth, that I shall have to take it home and ravel it out gradually in my mind in little shreds. In the mean while, dear, suppose we stop in the village, and get some little brown-ware cups for top-overs. You never ate any of my top-overs? Well, when you ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Antwerp to Cadiz. Cobham gave chase, easily captured her in the Bay of Biscay, and discovered there were forty Inquisition prisoners aboard. After rescuing the prisoners, the captain and crew of the Spanish vessel were then sewn up in their own mainsail and tossed into the sea, no doubt with such sententious expressions of godliness as was thought befitting to sacred occasions of that period. This ceremony having been performed, the vessel was scuttled, so that she might nevermore be used in trading with British ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... depressing influence of the scene. I was about to save the life of my friend—to restore a crack shot to society. Indeed I scarcely thought of That Jim, whose heels were grinding the hard gravel close behind me, except when he saw fit occasionally to propound the sententious, and I thought derisive, query, "Tired?" Of course I was, but I would have died rather than ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... who was fifteen years of age, went to live as farm lad with Kinvig, of Ballavolley. Kinvig was a solemn person, very stiff and starchy, and sententious in his way, a mighty man among the Methodists, and a power in the pulpit. He thought he had done an act of charity when he took Davy into his home, and Davy repaid him in due time by falling in love with Nelly, ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... stile to expresse the authour's eloquence, or vntil I adioyne to this another tome, if none other in the meane time do preuent me, which with all my heart I wishe and desire: because the workes of Boccaccio for his stile, order of writing, grauitie, and sententious discourse, is worthy of intire prouulgation. Out of Bandello I haue selected seuen, chosing rather to follow Launay and Belleforest the French Translatours, than the barren soile of his own vain, who being a Lombard, doth frankly confesse himselfe ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... too—had read much, and all that kind of thing. But he was not the sort of man you might expect to get on well with women. Unless with very intimate friends, he was a trifle silent and reserved. Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly bitter things when some careless joke was being made. He was a little dingy in appearance; and a man who had a somewhat cold manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously getting gray, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... consequences to follow his presumption. The woman stood near, waiting till we should seat ourselves at the table, and listening to it all with an amused air, which had something in it of the look with which one listens to the sententious remarks of a pompous child. We sat down to supper, and I ate heartily. My bygone distresses began ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... lot of talk when folks die sudden," he went on, in a sententious tone. "It was as plain as the nose on your face that the Colonel, poor chap, 'ad 'ad what they called shell-shock. I'd heard 'im a-talking aloud to 'isself many a time. 'E was a-weary of life 'e was. So 'tis ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... many naked swords upon the grave of this corpse, which was disinterred three or four times a day, according to the caprice of the first comer, an Albanian, who chanced to be at Mico accidentally, bethought himself of saying in a sententious tone, that it was very ridiculous to make use of the swords of Christians in such a case. Do you not see, blind as ye are, said he, that the hilt of these swords, forming a cross with the handle, prevents the devil from coming out of that body? why do you not ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... that of any of his tutors was exercised by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, his mother's chief friend and adviser. He was a fine showy man, vain of his handsome person, theatrical in his manners, pompous, slow and sententious in his speech. His private life was respectable; he had literary and scientific tastes, and a good deal of superficial knowledge. His abilities were small; he would, George's father used to say, "make an excellent ambassador in any court where there was nothing to do".[2] He lacked ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... maternal care by families residing in Martinique. Monsieur Pron, professor of rhetoric in a college presided over by priests, belonged to the Phellion class; but, instead of expanding on the surface in phrases and demonstrations, and posing as an example, he was dry and sententious. Monsieur and Madame Pron, the flowers of the Phellion salon, received every Monday. Though a professor, the little man danced. He enjoyed great influence in the quarter enclosed by the boulevard du Mont-Parnasse, ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of reading reveals itself even in connection with a subject remote from his ordinary field, and here as elsewhere he shows himself prone to quote from the drama.[160] But Scott was interested in plays for what he found in them of characters and manners, of witty and sententious speech, of situations and incidents, and only secondarily in the technical aspects of the drama. Reading his novels we could guess that he would care more for the concrete elements of a play than for the orderly ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... for you sir, your reasons at dinner haue beene sharpe & sententious: pleasant without scurrillity, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresie: I did conuerse this quondam day with a companion of the Kings, who is intituled, nominated, or ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... important dogmas and sententious jokes, pompous anecdotes and oracular discourses, dealt out for the edification of the whole assembly in general, and of the admiring Mrs. Markham, the polite Mr. Lawrence, the sedate Mary Millward, the quiet Richard ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Jacques, in a quick, sententious manner, that was intended to get rid of the fair tormentor, and which, temporarily at least, was not ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... cheerful. The descendants of persecutors, or those whom he supposed guilty of entertaining similar tenets, and the scoffers at religion by whom he was sometimes assailed, he usually termed the generation of vipers. Conversing with others, he was grave and sententious, not without a cast of severity. But he is said never to have been observed to give way to violent passion, excepting upon one occasion, when a mischievous truant-boy defaced with a stone the nose of a cherub's face, which the old man was engaged in retouching. I am in general a sparer of ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Artful Madge's sententious observation with regard to adversity was the fruit of bitter experience. Misfortune's arrows had been raining thick and fast about her, and although she was holding her ground against them very well, she felt that ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... common sense. For that I should be sorry. I remember her words because so often, when sinking in sloughs of childish despond, they afforded me firm foothold. More often than I can tell, when compelled to listen to the sententious voice of immeasurable Folly glibly explaining the eternal mysteries, has it comforted me to whisper to myself: "I don't believe it of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... which grew. His published opinions, as in his Instructions to his Son, on wives and marriage, like those of other writers of aphorisms in his age, ring harshly and coldly. But he did not act on frigid fragments of sententious suspiciousness. He was careful for his widow's worldly welfare. With death, as it seemed, imminent, he trusted with all, and in everything, his 'sweet Besse,' his 'faithful wife,' as scoffing Harington with enthusiasm called her. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... ladies and gentlemen, in silks and jewels, to the assemblies of the night. Within, the candles sparkled, and the diamonds, and the eyes of the company, sitting round in gilded delicate chairs. And then there was supper, and the Marquise was witty, and the Comte was sententious, while yet newer vistas opened of yet happier worlds, dancing on endlessly through the floods of conversation ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... what it is this year," he sagely replied. "It's diamonds in the heels!" He gave a sententious nod of his head. "I overheard Kathleen and her mother discussing plans. And—do you want to know next season's innovation? By George! I'm a regular spy." He stopped and laughed heartily at his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... (to be brief in explaining my real opinion,) to speak in a well-arranged and suitable manner without good ideas is to act like a madman. But to speak in a sententious manner, without any order or method in one's language, is to behave like a child: but still it is childishness of that sort, that those who employ it cannot be considered stupid men, and indeed may often be accounted wise men. And if a man is contented with that sort of character, why ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... this idea a new one to the first century of our era, and so it was in Europe and Syria. But in India, Sakyamuni, probably five hundred years before, had laid down in sententious maxims the philosophical principle which underlies the higher religious doctrine of a future life. These are his words, and if through the efforts of reasoning we ever reach a demonstration of the immortality of the soul, we shall do it by pursuing the argument here indicated: "Right ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... as have made a good livin' by mindin' their own business," observed the still sententious Mrs. Wiley, as she speared a soda biscuit with ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Fates that worked them ill." This sententious close of the prologue introduces the main story, chiefly dramatic in form, in which Brynhild persuades Gunnar to plan the death of Sigurd, and Gunnar persuades Hogni. It is love for Sigurd, and jealousy of Gudrun, that form ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... driving—the Colonel and I—post-haste to Bedford Place, lest by any means Chad might have heard of the affair and so be frightened half out of his wits; the calm indifference of that loyal darky when he ushered us into the hall and heard the Colonel's statement, and Chad's sententious comment: "In de Calaboose, Colonel! Well, fo' Gawd! what I tell ye 'bout dis caanin' bis'ness. Got to git dem barkers ready jes' I tol' ye; dat's de only thing dat'll settle dis muss,"—these and other incidents of the day equally interesting ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... common pursuits, occupations, and incidents of life. They rise to the exaltation of the epithalamium, or of the vintage song; at other times they deal with sentiment and human conduct, being in the highest degree sententious and epigrammatic. We must give the credit to Confucius of having saved for us the literature of China, and of having set his people an example in preserving the monuments of a remote antiquity. While the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome have largely perished ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... cheap republications, is naturally very anxious to prevent the passage of an international copy-right law. As might be anticipated of such an advocate, his real reasons are all based upon the argumentum ad crumenam, the argument to the purse. Mr. ADAMSON, in a few satirical, well-reasoned, sententious paragraphs, has fairly demolished the superstructure which Selfishness had reared, and exposed the misrepresentations upon which alone the unsubstantial fabric could have rested. It is quiet and good-natured, but cutting; and will act as an antidote to ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... the definition. Proverbs must be distinguished from proverbial phrases, and from sententious maxims; but as proverbs have many faces, from their miscellaneous nature, the class itself scarcely admits of any definition. When Johnson defined a proverb to be "a short sentence frequently repeated by the people," this definition would not include the most curious ones, which have not always ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... conviction even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him. None of the ladies ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... (though that is a bad word in the present case) to the capacity of every reader. But still if we turn to a volume of Paine's (his Common Sense or Rights of Man) we are struck (not to say somewhat refreshed) by the difference. Paine is a much more sententious writer than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any of his best and earlier works without meeting with some maxim, some antithetical and memorable saying, which is a sort of starting-place for the argument, and the goal to which it returns. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes—the epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of aphorisms, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... not know what they like," said Aunt Louise. Aunt Louise was apt to be sententious. ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... strain that may be placed upon our patience is a virtue," I remarked—sententious pedagogue—and she lifted her hands, clasped them behind her head, looked at me and laughed, a music sweet and low. Just then Alf came out upon the passage, looking down at himself, first one side and then the other; and it was ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read
... had passed, from the time of their first meeting, and the master was sitting late one evening over the moral and sententious copies, when there came a tap at the door, and again M'liss stood before him. She was neatly clad and clean-faced, and there was nothing perhaps but the long black hair and bright black eyes to remind him of his former apparition. "Are ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... his fellow-man," replied Pipelet, in a sententious and melancholy tone: "and more particularly so when his fellow-man is so ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... He'd tell her to apply for the position. It would take about five minutes to put out that independent Amanda Reist and vote in the other girl—it just takes some people to plan! He, Mr. Mertzheimer, had planned it! Probably in his limited education he had never read that sententious line regarding what often happens to the best laid plans ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... in my youth from my father, my uncle, and old persons who had lived in those times, that the Duke trusted the Duchess with the secret, and she her sister the popish Duchess of Tyrconnel, who was as poor and as bigoted as a church mouse. A corroboration of this was the wise and sententious answer of King William to the Duke, whom he taxed with having betrayed the secret. "upon my honour, Sir," said the Duke, "I told it to nobody but my wife." "I did not tell it to mine!" ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... pipe, for he still retained a little of his treasured tobacco, and in a slow, sententious tone repeated one of those tribal legends which are all that keep alive the fire of patriotism and national pride, in the breasts of a people who find themselves strangers, outcasts, and without a country in the land of their birth, once ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... taste as well as classical erudition Ascham preferred Sophocles and Euripides to the oratorical and sententious Seneca, his view was not shared by the renaissance. Scaliger, preoccupied as he was with style, found his ideal of tragedy not in the plays of the great Greeks, but in the closet dramas of the declamatory Spaniard. Seneca appealed to the renaissance not only on account of his verbal dexterity ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... difficulties in the way of her angelic part, for her father addressed her in his most solemn and sententious manner: 'Rose, I have always looked on you as sensible and discreet, but I have to say that I disapprove of your late promenades with a young ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... artlessness and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part of the truth concerning them. They are, indeed and especially those spoken in Galilee, and reported for the most part in the Synoptists, the perfection of popular speech. How the short, pithy, sententious sayings cling to the memory like burs! Let almost any of them be commenced, and as Dr. Stalker says, the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the sentence. Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... a good deal at the sententious gravity with which the leader delivered his orders, and the self-important strides with which he passed over the land. He would have grinned still more, perhaps have laughed outright if he had understood that the occasional off-hand kicks which Disco bestowed on a thick bush here and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... lasts the pretty coquettish bride will keep on changing her charming dresses; and the sultan's groom (poor man! and for nothing at all) will be kept standing on his head. The moribund Nur al-Din turns Polonius and delivers himself of sententious precepts. "Security," he tells his son, "lieth in seclusion of thought and a certain retirement from the society of thy fellows.... In this world there is none thou mayst count upon... so live for thyself, nursing hope of none. Let thine own ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... He was taught to despise literature as unworthy of a warrior, while the study of eloquence and philosophy, which were cultivated at Athens with such extraordinary success, was regarded at Sparta with contempt. Long speeches were a Spartan's abhorrence, and he was trained to express himself with sententious brevity. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... piece of history," but a piece of biography into the bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally amusing, and carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a volume of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are both signed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... integrity of purpose be forms of genius. She does not gossip delightfully; at times she may seem a little hard or dry; but her reason is really guided by human kindness. "Her style," wrote a high authority, Dollinger, "is clear, terse, refined, often sententious; her business letters are patterns of simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be characterised as womanly yet manly, so well do they combine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with the strength and lucidity of a masculine ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... prayer," I began with awful solemnity, "and send the great Ranunculus to loose the binding chain of concupiscence, heaving the multitudinous aquacity upon the heads of this wicked and sententious generation, whelming these diametrical ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... friend Leary, because we have taken proper precautions to prevent an accident," observed Mr Ragget, who had adopted a peculiarly sententious tone in speaking to Pat, a great contrast to the other's rapid style ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... foggy allusions to the mysterious past. I may mention that his own conduct in the interval had been such as I can only regard as a lamentable relapse from the altitude of the earlier chapters. But it is all vastly serious—it would perhaps be unkind to say sententious—and wholly unruffled by the faintest suggestion of comedy. For which reason I should never be startled to learn that HARRY TIGHE was either youthful, Scotch, or female (or indeed, for that matter, all three). In any case I can only hope ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... coadjutor until his arrival in Baltimore. Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and declared his decision to conduct his campaign against the national iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation. The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye. But Lundy with sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical: "Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own burden." And the arrangement pleased the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... resort, can be exacted by withholding supplies—not so uncommon a form of blackmail as it suits the dominant sex to imagine. Lady Harman's emancipation does not take the conventionally unconventional form, for some deeper reason, I think, than that her sententious friend and would-be lover, George Brumley, could not altogether escape her gentle contempt; indeed, she recognises Sir Isaac's claims upon her for duty and gratitude in a way which modern high-spirited priestesses of progress would scarcely ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... resolved never to put yourself in the way of winning more than such and such a sum a day." This light way of declining invitations to vice and folly, is more becoming a young man, than philosophical or sententious refusals, which ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious] I know not well what degree of respect Shakespeare intends to obtain for this vicar, but he has here put into his mouth a finished representation of colloquial excellence. It is very difficult to add any thing to this character of the school-master's table-talk, and perhaps all ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... she were really in love with Ferdinand as she has pretended to be, how easy it would be for her, without violating her oath, to put him on his guard against the trap that has been laid for him! In the scene with Lady Milford she appears as a pert little pharisee, caustic, sententious and philosophical beyond her years; so that one wonders why a girl that knows so much should not know more. She herself has just cast her lover off, after meeting his passionate entreaties with cool prudential argument. In a stagy paroxysm of jealousy she resigns her Ferdinand to Lady Milford, warning ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... royal brothers, Sigurd the Crusader and Eystein, has broken into full blaze, and traces, in a series of vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax—a mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... just been completed. Already a company had embarked upon the construction of the Georgia Railroad, and on May 21, 1837, the first locomotive ever put in motion on the soil of Georgia moved out from Augusta. A local paper described the event in sententious terms: ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... these remarkable and well-known words of the Roman general, I beg to forward two more sententious despatches of celebrated generals: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts; [43] ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and the skies; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... replied, "there is no pain. I don't mean to be sententious, but this is the death-grapple that is coming. They will need me and every one ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... door opened, and Master Mumblazen appeared—a withered, thin, elderly gentleman, with a cheek like a winter apple, and his grey hair partly concealed by a small, high hat, shaped like a cone, or rather like such a strawberry-basket as London fruiterers exhibit at their windows. He was too sententious a person to waste words on mere salutation; so, having welcomed Tressilian with a nod and a shake of the hand, he beckoned him to follow to Sir Hugh's great chamber, which the good knight usually inhabited. Will Badger followed, unasked, anxious to see whether his master would be ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... an interrogation of nature. We have, in Bacon's grand sententious phrase, to command nature by obeying. We learn what are the laws of social growth by living them. The great difficulty of the interrogation is to know what questions we are to put. Under the guidance of metaphysicians, we have too often asked questions to which ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... too, there is another type of age which is hardly less painful, and that is the complacent and sententious old person, intolerably talkative and minutely confidential, who lays down the law about everything, and takes what he calls the privileges of age, a sort of professional patriarch, ruddy and snowy-haired ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... on previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind was still largely ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... His features had softened, perhaps, in their determined expression, but his square, massive jaws always gave him a resolute look. He loved to listen better than to talk, but when with friends he would always take part in the conversation, often spicing his sententious remarks with humorous comments. His sentences, at times epigrammatic, were those of "a plain, blunt soldier," but his vigorous economy of words lent additional force to what he said, and he would not only hold his own in a discussion with Senators learned in the law, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... observed by Dr. Johnson "that nothing can supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will render knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible." This sententious apothegm is thrown out in contemplating the life of Savage, one of the English poets who united some of the highest requisites of genius with the lowest personal habits. But how much instruction does it convey to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... made by Tecumseh have been preserved. Tradition speaks in exalted terms of several efforts of this kind, of which no record was made. All bore evidence of the high order of his intellectual powers. They were uniformly forcible, sententious and argumentative; always dignified, frequently impassioned and powerful. He indulged neither in sophism nor circumlocution, but with bold and manly frankness, gave utterance to his honest opinions. Mr. Ruddell, who knew him long and intimately, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... Mr. Ludolph's bidding looked at the living and the painted girl. In his slow, sententious tones, one could not help feeling that he was telling just how things appeared to him. The young lady stood beside the painting and unconsciously assumed the expression of her fair shadow. Indeed it seemed an expression but too ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... you. We Americans have spent a generation in experimenting with the inductive, the subjective method in education, and the result is, to all intents and purposes, a dismal failure. The future will prove the value of the objective, the deductive—which is mine," he added with a sententious emphasis that left the puzzled rector no ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... where, let him be ever so innocent at present, he was certain to come out as much inclined to be guilty as his friends could desire; joined to such moral reflection as the tragedy of Bombastes Furioso might have afforded to himself in that sententious and terse line,— ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... appears from his satires against the Jesuits, in which there is discovered as much learning as wit. In the second volume of the great historical, geographical, and poetical Dictionary, he is stiled the Darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth writer: "His translations exceed the original, and his invention seems matchless. His satire against the Jesuits is of special note; he may be justly said to have excelled all the satirists of the age." Tho' this compliment ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... to me the most wonderful specimen of sententious fluency I had ever witnessed. The words poured from his lips in a torrent, but the sentences were correctly formed, the matter grave and important, the train of thought distinctly pursued, the illustrations wonderfully ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long, flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to the Leconte de Lisle. See his "Discours de Réception." Is it possible to imagine anything more absurdly arid? Rhetoric of this sort, "des vers d'or sur une éclume d'airain" and such sententious platitudes as this (speaking of the realists), "Les épidémies de cette nature passent, et ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... All very fine, and, doubtless, very true, as well as sententious and profound. But hark you, Mr. Wiseman, to something not dreamt of in your philosophy! We women dress, not to be simple, genuine, and harmonious, or even to please you men, but to brave each other's criticism; and so, when the time comes to get our Fall things, Laura and I will go and ask ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... clout in the versall world. Doth not Rosemarie and Romeo begin both with a letter? Rom. I Nurse, what of that? Both with an R Nur. A mocker that's the dogs name. R. is for the no, I know it begins with some other letter, and she hath the prettiest sententious of it, of you and Rosemary, that it would do ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... sufficient to show the erudition of the author, and a comparatively slight examination raises our estimation of his sagacity and wisdom. These essays, the last productions of his pen, are not unworthy of circulation with those of Lord Bacon, of which they frequently remind us by apt allusions, sententious definitions, clear-headed distinctions, and sharp antitheses, no less than by profound insight into the workings of human nature. We had marked passages for quotation, which our limits will not permit. One, however, we must cite, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... measures, but indulge in novelties which offend against the genius of the language, and the true canons of taste. Political causes may co-operate in a revolt of this kind; and, as a nation declines in patriotism, so does its language in purity. It seems to me as if the sententious, epigrammatic style of writing, which set in with Seneca, and is seen at least as late as in the writings of St. Ambrose, is an attempt to escape from the simplicity of Caesar and the majestic elocution of Cicero; while Tertullian, with more of genius than ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... is always, young and romantic," said John, sententious. "I can't admit that an age of prose and prudence is possible. The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly. The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... fortunate, who link themselves unto the unstable and fluctuating part of creation, which we term women, more especially in an hymeneal capacity—whatever these may be, I have my refuge and my comforter in the golden-souled and dreaming Plato, and the sententious wisdom of the less imaginative Seneca. Nor, when I am reminded of my approaching dissolution by the symptoms which do mostly at the midnight hour press themselves upon me, is there a small and inglorious pleasure in the hope that I may meet hereafter, in those ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... without so much talk," returned the sententious black, pointing one of his crooked and dingy fingers at the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... "No Storri," was the sententious remark of Inspector Val; "not a sign of him. But I've thought it out. Do you know why we don't find Storri? The reason is the best in the world; the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... down, taken aback by the nobility of my emotions and sententious eloquence. For some time my attention turned to one old gunner, riding beside me, who constantly climbed in his stirrups, lifted his head, neck craned over the shoulders ...
— My First Battle • Adam Mickiewicz
... to enter on the vexed questions connected with more celebrated poets, we may name Darwin and Dr Thomas Brown as two specimens of the building, and Robert Blair as an admirable example of the quarry. In household words and sententious truths, he yields (taking his space into consideration), not even to Young, or Pope, or Cowper, but to Shakspeare alone. His poem is a tissue of texts; many of his expressions might pass and have passed for bits of Hamlet. Take ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Norman, when he started, had intended to employ the evening in giving good counsel to his friend, and in endeavouring to arrange some scheme by which he might rescue the brand from the burning; but he had not the heart to be severe and sententious while Charley was full of his fun. It was so much pleasanter to talk to him on the easy terms of equal friendship than turn Mentor and ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... wills. Could such a play as the "Suppliants" of Euripedes find any aesthetic justification, save that it has the one dramatic essential—confrontation, balance of emotions? The very scenes of short speeches, of objurgation or sententious repartee, which cannot but have for us an element of the grotesque, must have been as pleasing as they were to the Greek audience, from the fact that they brought to sharpest vision the confrontation of the two antagonists. The mediaeval drama, which has become popularly known in "Everyman," ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... a deeply sententious manner. "You are not wholly unacquainted with the literature of our vivacious kindred across the Atlantic, I believe, Hal? Well, do you know the expression 'playing possum'? because that's what I did. I got a glancing bullet across my forehead, where this imposing scar is, just here, which ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... of the Woodman's; a change of label would enable the lion to change places with the spaniel, would suffice to cage the wolf as a bird and set free the parrot as a beast of prey. All are equally pert, brisk, and dapper in expression; all are equally sententious and smart in aim; all are absolutely identical in function and effect. The whole gathering is stuffed with the same straw, prepared with the same dressing, ticketed in the same handwriting, and painted ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... his sententious way, cocking his eye as the cutter sped on its way towards the training-ship. "But jest you look at me, Tom, and see what forty years' sailorin', man and boy, have done for one o' the same kidney as them boys, jolly though they seems now. Poor young beggars, ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... sprightly youths, quite flushed with hope and spirit, Who think to storm the world by dint of merit, To you the dotard has a deal to say, In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way; He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle, That the first blow is ever half the battle: That tho' some by the skirt may try to snatch him, Yet by the forelock is the hold to catch him; That whether doing, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of a student of Kazan whom I had known in the days of the past, of a young fellow from Viatka who, pale-browed, and sententious of diction, might almost have been brother to the ex-soldier himself. And once again I heard him declare that "before all things must I learn whether or not there exists a God; pre-eminently must ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... sense of things, which, like poetry, is born in a man, not acquired—the result, generally, as in his case, of an innate power, combined with large, varied, and calming experience. Like most men of this stamp, he had both a keen sense of the humorous, and a racy talent for it; abounded in sententious, remarkable sayings; and had a dash of playfulness and eccentricity which gave a zest to his many solid excellences. The physician who attended his deathbed, often expressed regret that he had not kept a memorandum of his many striking observations ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... duly considered, different, far different would be my station. What! am I thus exalted in situation above my [sic] situated, (as I may say,) in the very van, exposed to the sneer of every satirical reader and sententious critic? Am I placed in a post so dangerous, and are contempt and humiliation my only reward? O, mankind, where is your gratitude? Think, generous reader, on the services I have so often rendered you: think how often, when you were about to enter upon the stupendous folio, or the dull ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... England was full of witty writers he was outside the charmed circle of wits who pretended not to know of his existence. "One of these authors," says another writer, "(the fellow that was pilloried, I have forgotten his name), is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue that there is no ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... most part concerned with the commonplaces of etiquette and good manners, but there is something not only apt but quite prophetic in the last one, "Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." To suppose that Washington's character was formed by these sententious bits of not very profound wisdom would be absurd; but that a series of rules which most lads would have regarded as simply dull should have been written out and pondered by this boy indicates a soberness and thoughtfulness ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... sovereign. When the Queen of Sheba, attracted by the reports of his glory, came from Southern Arabia to visit the monarch, she exclaimed, "The half was not told me." He was the wisest king of the East. His proverbs are famous specimens of sententious wisdom. He was versed, too, in botany, being acquainted with plants and trees "from the hyssop upon the wall to the cedar ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... temporal authority. Later, in 1467, as the audacity of his opponents increased, the archbishop appealed to his brother, the elector, and to Charles of Burgundy. The latter was busy in France, but he wrote a sententious letter to Cologne, exhorting both chapter and city to be obedient to their chosen spiritual and lay lord. This intervention was resented. The breach widened between Robert and his people, culminating in actual hostilities. The chapter took possession of ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... and strict connection, to put down the results of my reflections upon the most important points in quite brief, precise, compact propositions. The manner in which Montesquieu has treated his subject floated before me in idea. I thought that concise, sententious chapters, which I proposed at first to call grains, would attract the attention of the intelligent just as much by that which was to be developed from them, as by that which they contained in themselves. I had, therefore, before me in idea, intelligent readers already ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... Lowestoffe, "most sapient and sententious Master Moniplies. May you soon have another mortgage to redeem, and may I be there to witness it; and may you play the good fellow, as heartily as you have ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... contrast to his brother. He was methodical and sententious, expressed his opinion on all subjects with the air of a man whose judgment was infallible, and was an ardent disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau. It was very seldom that he entered his father's house, where his opinions on religious subjects shocked and horrified his mother and sister. ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith, and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... I do not see any good reason you have for intimating that in the present case the right direction has not been taken." There was just perceptible a touch of indignation in the voice of Mrs. Markland, which, being perceived by Grace, brought the sententious remark,— ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... had been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural history books you ever saw. Its name was Evenings at Home; and in it was a story called "Eyes and no Eyes;" a regular old-fashioned, prim, sententious story; ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... we commemorate is all-important, not merely in our own annals, but in those of the world. The sententious English poet has declared that "the proper study of mankind is man," and of all inquiries of a temporal nature, the history of our fellow-beings is unquestionably among the most interesting. But not all the chapters of human history are alike important. The annals of our ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... rude as well as gross in speech, and given to practical joking. He relieved it of all the rudeness, if not of all the grossness, and reformed the joking altogether; but he also filled the Fool's jesting with sententious satire, and while preserving the low-comedy style of the character, brought it into keeping with a lofty and even a tragic view of life. In "King Lear" the Fool rises into heroic proportions, and becomes a sort of conscience, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... of which Milton, in the same predicament, so mournfully complains. At his death his consort remained an early widow, with a male child of three years old, which, in the sobriety wherewith it demeaned itself, in the old-fashioned and even grim cast of its features, and in its sententious mode of expressing itself, would sufficiently have vindicated the honour of the widow of Beersheba, had any one thought proper to challenge the babe's descent from ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... threatened but failed to bring. That "the literary Pecksniff" took this course could not but create a bad impression at the time, and Hall has therefore been put down as one of the butts whom Punch had justly assailed. Of course his sententious catch-phrase of appealing to "hand, head, and heart" was always made the most of, and Punch delighted in paraphrasing it as ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... be the spirit of war!" ventured a Baluchi, forgetting the one God of his Koran in a sententious effort to please Yasmini. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... ignorantly, in this kind have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model. He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... concise, brief, short, terse, close; to the point, exact; neat, compact; compressed, condensed, pointed; laconic, curt, pithy, trenchant, summary; pregnant; compendious &c (compendium) 596; succinct; elliptical, epigrammatic, quaint, crisp; sententious. Adv. concisely &c adj.; briefly, summarily; in brief, in short, in a word, in a few words; for shortness sake; to come to the point, to make a long story short, to cut the matter short, to be brief; it comes to this, the long and the short of it is. Phr. brevis esse laboro obscurus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... beside her. He's a prim, Sententious sage. If she is bored by him, The lady doth not show it. But there's a furtive glancing of her eye Toward the entry. There comes MARX M'KAY, The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... chapters, which I promised to write before I went to sleep, I thought it meet to ease my conscience entirely before I laid down, by telling the world all I knew about the matter at once: Is not this ten times better than to set out dogmatically with a sententious parade of wisdom, and telling the world a story of a roasted horse—that chapters relieve the mind—that they assist—or impose upon the imagination—and that in a work of this dramatic cast they are ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... factory was the sphere of the Senator, a supper-table was the place for Mr. Figgs. The others felt that they had never before known fully all the depth of feeling, of fancy, and of sentiment that lurked under that placid, smooth, and rosy exterior. The Doctor was epigrammatic; the Senator sententious; ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... was shy and we were shy, but I think we spoke quite freely with him, and he seldom said more than "Foolish child" when we ventured on any startling views on things. Once I remember rousing his indignation when I gave out, with sententious priggishness, that the Duke of Wellington laboured under great difficulties in Spain caused by the "factious opposition at home;" that was beyond "Foolish child," but my discomforted distress was soon soothed by a pat on the cheek, and an amused twinkle in his kind eyes.' Lord Amberley, ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... rather than fastened with very much salivated wafers. His writing too was very slow, and his choice of language not extensive; a letter on such a subject from a brother to a sister should be well turned, impressive, terse, sententious: that scheme would never have done ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with wit, As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it; Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonder's schools To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... was, or what he did, is unknown, but he made a sententious remark which led Izaak Walton to give him immortality in his work, "The Compleat Angler." "Indeed, my good schollar," the serene Izaak writes, "we may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, 'Doubtless God could have ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe |
