"Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sensation of nearness that each succeeding hour magnified, and she wondered who this being was who had brought so much trouble into her life even before she had seen him. As the word 'trouble' went through her mind she paused, arrested by a passing feeling of sentimentality; but it explained nothing, defined nothing, only touched her as a breeze does a flower, and floated away. The dreamy warmth of the fire absorbed her more direct feelings, and for some moments she dozed in a haze of dim ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... musician one evening; "you who are so keen an observer, and who knows so much, has it ever struck you that Spain is sad, and has not the sweet sentimentality of true poetry? She is not melancholy, she is sad, with a wild and savage silence. She either laughs in wild peals, or weeps moaning. She has not the gentle smile, the joyful brightness that distinguishes the man from the animal. If she laughs it ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... did one seem to have any advantage over the others, so it was immaterial to her which one she had a good time with. The good time was the main thing to her. Sahwah had a fifteen—year—old brother, and she knew what a boy was under his white collar and "boiled" shirt. There was no silly sentimentality in her spicy make-up. She was a royal good companion when there was any fun going on, but it was about as easy to "get soft" with her as with a stone fence post. She was a master hand at ridicule and the boys knew this ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... of The Music Master, we are tempted not to notice that the play itself is faulty in structure, untrue in character, and obnoxiously sentimental in tone. Because Mr. Warfield, by the sheer power of his histrionic genius, has lifted sentimentality into sentiment and conventional theatricism into living truth, we are tempted to give to Mr. Charles Klein the credit for having written a very good play instead ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... writing, which has a pure and almost childlike naivete of phrasing, there is a glow, not of rhetoric or language, but of emotion, an almost lover-like attitude towards his friends, which is yet saved from sentimentality by an obvious sincerity of feeling. In this he seems to me to be different from the majority of artistic natures and temperaments. It is impossible not to feel, as a rule, when one is brought into contact with an artistic temperament, that the basis of it is a kind of hardness, a fanaticism of spirit. ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... distracting desires; (4) a desire to win others' good opinion and sympathy,—therefore he always lavished his money on those whom that kind of "good fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position, restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing, fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face the difficulties ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... pleasant thing in the meaningless room was Nannie's drawing-board, which displayed the little girl's painstaking and surprisingly exact copy in lead-pencil, of some chromo—"Evangeline" perhaps, or some popular sentimentality of the sixties. In the ten years which had elapsed since Mrs. Maitland had plunged into her debauch of furnishing—her one extravagance!—of course the parlors had softened; the enormous roses of the carpets had faded, the glitter of varnish had dimmed; but the change was not sufficient to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... human civilization. First: the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one. This is the age of selfishness. Second: the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody's else work for him. This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer. But the third stage is represented by our formula: every man must render and receive the best possible service, except in the case of inequality, and there ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... forward with my offering, and a certain significant shyness in her manner that were enough to throw me into a state of hopeless imbecility. And I was always miserably conscious that Consuelo possessed an exalted sentimentality, and a predilection for the highest mediaeval romance, in which I knew I was lamentably deficient. Even in our most confidential moments I was always aware that I weakly lagged behind this daughter of a gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions into a vague but poetic ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... remarked, simply. "I never believed in Mannering's sentimentality. To-day, with his own lips, he has confessed to me that another, an unbroached reason, stands ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Tournous, near Macon, and lived to see the century out, dying in 1805, at the age of seventy-eight. His popularity is nowadays due chiefly to his heads of young girls, which he painted in his later life with admirable skill, but with a sentimentality that almost repels. The famous example in the National Gallery is more free from the sickly sweetness that spoils most of them, and reminds us that he could paint more serious works, and paint them exceedingly well. He first came into notice by pictures like La Lecture du Bible, La Malediction ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... quietly and thoroughly himself, get to know the man, his belongings and environment, and then deal with him as he saw fit. The thing's not workable; the judge might have an attack of indigestion that would jaundice his view, or be in a rosy glow of sentimentality after port. But if the judge could be depended on for sympathy and intuitiveness, half the crime in the world would be stamped out. It's the same everywhere. If priests could be allowed to discriminate between divorced persons they ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... none of the sentimentality so common at that age, and it can be proved that she had never an attachment, nor was disappointed in love, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a rather sweet sentimentality. The rondo at the end is presented rather like an idea of Franck's, and is the best part of the composition; it is carried out in a spirit of mad intoxication and a chorale rises up from it with crashing joy; but the effect of the whole is lost in repetitions that choke it and make it heavy. Through ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... say it a thousand times afterwards, but not here. Above all, let us have no sentimentality now or everything will fall through. We must look at this matter coldly like sensible people. [Takes out a cigar and lights it.] Now sit down there and I'll sit here and we'll take it over as ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... communicate it, as though he had discovered it. I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant, whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly. And women can feel these things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his. He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and he stood right up and acknowledged ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "Sentimentality!" Novodvoroff ejaculated ironically; "it is difficult for us to understand the emotions of these people and the motives on which they act. You see generosity in the act, and it may be simply ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often exercise over natives of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... they ate, and the amount they slept in that immense feather bed with their feet locked together... William couldn't help a grim smile as he thought of Isabel's horror if she knew the full extent of his sentimentality. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... American poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and purity ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... he replied at length. "Isn't that an admission for a man of my age to make? I know it always, but there are times when I must tell you so. Don't call it weakness, dear, or sentimentality. There is a relief which I could never explain in turning from these battles with men and with events to your companionship, which demanded nothing ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... asserted their rightful influence. After publishing his greatest poem, The Excursion, the tide of generous appreciation set in. In 1843, Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His pure and fervent poetry was a protest against the diseased sentimentality of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... plan," Gifford replied dryly. "All the same, if I can retrieve my evening kit, which has gone astray, I hope to enjoy myself at Wynford Place to-night without being troubled with undue sentimentality." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... she has none of the sentimentality of the English highwayman's lady; but being wooed by a ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strong as you are and be trifled with. I understand that now, Mr. Lane. You had no sentimentality to be touched, and my tears did not move you in the least until you believed in my ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... a reverie; but as her expression changed from one of annoyance to something of wistfulness and sentimentality, the question of marriage with the Duke of Marshire had clearly been dismissed for that moment from her heart. At intervals a shy smile gave an almost childish tenderness to her face. Then, on a sudden, her eyelashes would droop, she would start with a sigh, and, apparently caught by some ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... to the helping of their brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the world, that is the true meaning ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... call love "mush"—"If you were a flowering rose," and "Come to my garden of love," were two typical examples. The remainder of the verses—with which the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the serenity of the suburban nights this summer—were of a "sloppy" sentimentality combined with a kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled except in an English ballad of the popular order. On such belief, I said to myself, are young lovers brought up. Well, I suppose it would be difficult for a youthful ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... as the sirens which English designers invent for their "Books of Beauty," Modeste was, like her mother before her, the captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France, where we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German women is the poetry of the heart coming to the surface of the being and spending itself—in affectations if the owner is silly, in divine charms of manner if she is "spirituelle" and intelligent. Remarkable for her pale golden hair, Modeste belonged to the type ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Brunt and Clive Timmis were married. It is characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the surface harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54 Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... us always couple this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their power. A truly philanthropic sentiment ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's Letty. This "epilogue"—so the author calls it—has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it—to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... entirely disappeared. "No, not wasted. You have enjoyed them, you say. Splendid justification. You will continue to enjoy them as the years grow between you and your college days. All men are sentimental about college, and in that sentimentality there is continuous pleasure." ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... propensity to emotional tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There was no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Harte's technique. Like Dickens and like Bret Harte, Duncan was a frank moralist. His chief concern was in winnowing the souls of men and women bare of the chaff of petty circumstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle may well be compared with A Christmas Carol. Norman Duncan never married, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... The story developed with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less as ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... him that I had been coming more and more to the idea—not as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the structural idea, of all one's political and social activities—of the whole world as one state and community and of God as the King ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the army are rejected; a large proportion of them because their teeth are gone or decayed. Do these figures need comment? Can you look for sound minds in such unsound bodies? Can you look for manliness, for self- respect, and self-control, or anything but animalistic sentimentality? ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of the hungry looks of the company; he was a soldier, and concentrated his mind upon the duties of the moment. Sentimentality was no part of his nature. He was a man, and must eat; he was a soldier, and must perform the work as ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... femininity, with the possession of which he would not have credited Brinnaria. At first he was irritated. As he missed sale after sale he became more and more aggravated. But he kept his temper, held his tongue and waited for Brinnaria's mood to alter. Her sentimentality gradually waned as the prices offered steadily mounted. After long hesitation she gave orders to sell at auction the furniture from the house of a distant cousin, and to rent the house. That broke the spell. One by one the late abodes of the Brinnarii were cleared and sold; sold furniture and ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... because she was tremendously in earnest. She was pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly sentimentality—sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel houses ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... forward to seeing doomsday, is a warning for you to give substantial and material affairs close attention, or you will find that the artful and scheming friends you are entertaining will have possession of what they desire from you, which is your wealth, and not your sentimentality. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Again and again in India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of deep-lying things, I ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... to say, as did His other son, "I and my Father are one"—the ultimate destiny of each human soul, each of the Father's children, for all, no matter what differences man may see, are equal in His sight; and He created not one in vain. So love to God in its true expression is not a mere sentimentality, a mere abstraction: it is life, it is growth, it is spiritual awakening and unfoldment, it is realization. Again, it is life: it is the more ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... do. Nothing is more charming than the frank comradeship of girls and boys, and that is why I am so sorry to see them spoil it with sentimentality. They ought to be good friends, helping each other, having jolly good times together, but never in ways that will bring a blush to the cheeks of either, now, or ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would draw ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... altitude, his aesthetic sense—which by this time had necessarily developed—he was struck by the exquisite beauty of Christianity, and thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly induced him to become an atheist, a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly made him a Christian. His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert Duerer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion more subtly voluptuous than desire; ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... settle; and if the old Viscount and that abominable Abiram don't find her out before then, you may depend upon it they will abandon the search. In the interim, the lady will have cooled. Walks upon the sea-shore are uncommonly dull without something like reciprocal sentimentality. The odds are, that the old aunt is addicted to snuff, tracts, and the distribution of flannel, and before August, the fair Dorothea will be yearning for a sight of her adorer. You can easily gammon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... irritating conventions. He began to doubt even whether she realised the full import of what had happened between them. There was nothing gross about his love, not even a speculation in his mind as to its ultimate conclusion. He was immersed in a wave of sentimentality. He wanted her by his side, free from any restraint. He wanted the joy of her presence, more of those soft, almost reluctant kisses, the mute obedience of her nature to the sweet and natural impulse of her love. Of the inevitable end of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they not been hers and she his. Only the poorest part of his poetic equipment had propagated in her, and had he taught her anything, she would not have overvalued it so much. Herself full of mawkish sentimentality, her verses could not fail to be foolish, their whole impulse being the ambition that springs from self-admiration. She had begun to look down on Kirsty, who would so gladly have been a mother to the motherless ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... me capable of religious sentimentality after what I have said of my religious opinions. Still, in these twenty years I have seen a great deal of the seamy side of the world. I have known its back-stairs, and I have discerned, in the march of events, a Power ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... anecdote and hilariousness. There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote. Everything, in short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life. It is idyllic. And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a person's stomach like a trivial bun: we might record on them, in cuneiform characters, our incipient civilization; and future generations would doubtless turn ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... after the cause for anger has been removed. All feelings tend to acquire a strength beyond what is necessary for action and to endure after their proper objects and conditions have disappeared; hence the luxury of grief and revenge and sentimentality. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... public taste and I hope much from its judicious use. Be careful that you select only the highest, purest types to offer to your countrymen and women, when Peace enables us to turn our attention to the great work of building up a noble school of Southern Art. We want no feeble, sickly sentimentality, nor yet the sombre austerity which seems to pervade your mind, judging from the ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... characters like his. It is possible that he may have always spoiled her a little; and it will soon be shown in what way her tenderness so often received that special material and encouragement which made it often degenerate into sickly sentimentality. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the coarsest irregularities; but if you step far back and study the circle as a whole, its regular, perfect form becomes quite distinct.'' But the circle must be drawn carefully and correctly, and one must not give way to sentimentality and tears when running over a fly's legs in drawing. Emil du Bois-Reymond[1] says against this: "When the postmaster announces that out of 100,000 letters a year, exactly so and so many come unaddressed, we think nothing of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... book-sales, and book-men, will then—if I am spared—pass before me as the faint reflex of "the light of OTHER DAYS!" ... when literary enterprise and literary fame found a proportionate reward; and when the sickly sentimentality of the novelist had not usurped the post of the instructive philologist. But enough ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... shoulders. "German sentimentality," said she. "If you mix sentiment with your cards, we shall lose the game, Count Podstadsky. Hear, then, what I have to say to you. It is true that we stand upon the brow of a precipice; but we must contemplate it fearlessly, and so we shall grow accustomed to our danger, and learn ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the whole crew of quacks collectively, and also, of course, individually. I don't believe in medicine. It's a useless institution. I mean to go into all that. But what's that sentimentality you've got up there? The whole class seems to be ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... what one wishes, and she wished to believe Legrand's protestations. She began to pity herself profoundly, feeling that she had thrown away the substance for the shadow. In the sentimentality to which she yielded, even the prospect of being a star turn failed to console her; and during the next few weeks she invented reasons for visiting at her ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... observation was made by someone speaking in harsh and bitter accents—"It is not love that really moves them so much as the self-satisfaction of BEING LOVED. No woman could be faithful for long to a dead man—she would lack the expected response to her superabundant sentimentality, and she would tire of waiting to meet him in Paradise—if she believed in such a possibility, which in nine cases out of ten she ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... which even now can be ascribed to the Mongol blood. The Bulgar is more stolid than the Serb; he is less given to sympathy and on that account can be cruel. The Bulgar is benevolent because he is urged by kindliness, whereas the more impressionable Serb is under the influence both of sentiment, sentimentality and sympathy. These differences of temperament—and there are others, more or less distinguishable—do not seem to Balkan thinkers any reason why the two should keep apart. And a couple of months after the Great War, during which the Bulgars, as their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... stand up in this presence to indulge in any mock sentimentality. You brave men who wore the gray would be the first to hold me or any other son of the North in just contempt if I should say that, now it was all over, I thought the North was wrong and the result of the war a mistake, and that I was prepared to suppress my political opinions. I believe ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan.[100] The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans, and mine was this:—'Whatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the type of a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... sex. You never returned. A few weeks later, through the elaborate investigations of the Metropolitan police, the perambulator was discovered at midnight, standing by itself in a remote corner of Bayswater. It contained the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality. [Miss Prism starts in involuntary indignation.] But the baby was not there! [Every one looks at Miss Prism.] Prism! Where is ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... harmless vanity, it rewards the attention of the reader by its lively, rapid descriptions, its unfailing fund of good humor, and its local and geographical details, which are frequently instructive and entertaining. The snatches of common-place sentimentality, which the author appears to indulge in both as a matter of taste and from a sense of duty, might safely be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... art, ever realised. The first descent of Freedom to our modern world, the first unfurling of her standard on the rocky pinnacle of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it deserved. There is no false timsel-decoration about Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory sentimentality. All is downright, simple, and agreeable to Nature; yet all is adorned and purified and rendered beautiful, without losing its resemblance. An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over it; we are ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... adultery, and for men in abstaining from theft! In short, the first injustice is practised by literature; it has no interest in esthetics, which is only a higher justice. The romantics will have a fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? it is always the story of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented! To repent is good, but not to do evil is better. The school of rehabilitations has led us to see no ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... in our religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... book is extremely good reading from end to end; it abounds in entertaining and exciting episodes, is wholly void of sentimentality, and enforces in the most unmistakable and wholesome way the duty of ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... Blinker tells Florence that he loves her. So accustomed is she to this display of sentimentality in her cavaliers that she merely laughs. He persists, and she indicates a belief that he is just like the rest. Mention of "the rest" awakes question in Blinker. He learns that she meets men indiscriminately. He has a horror of this evidence of what he considers to be moral laxity, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... stages of Irish educational history, might easily be multiplied, but they will serve as typical instances of that want of recognition by English statesmen of Irish thought on Irish problems, and that ignoring of Irish sentiment—as distinguished from Irish sentimentality—which I insist is the basal element in the misunderstandings ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... wife could be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines of heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral, political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... perfectly disgusted. I was sorry for her; an excess of sentimentality. But she hasn't kept ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they practised ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... from his thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience, heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling sentimentality? ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one's out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten's dead, it's dead, that's all. She doesn't mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she's got sense and guts. They're her family. I don't know that I could have put that kitten out of ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... another when she first returned, but her attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been anybody there to prescribe a strengthening ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... much I wished to hear from a man's standpoint, but how to make him understand was difficult. He had faced life frankly, knew what was subterfuge, what sincere, and the restrictions of custom and convention no longer handicapped him. Between sympathy and sentimentality he had found the right distinction, and his judgment and emotions had learned to work together. My judgment ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... other women is too low for him to heap upon you. Believe that the French men are sympathetic because they laugh and cry openly at the theatre. But appeal to their chivalry, and they will rescue you from one discomfort only to offer you a worse. The French have sentimentality, but not sentiment. They have gallantry, but not chivalry. They have vanity, but not pride. They have religion, but not morality. They are a combination of the wildest extravagance and the strictest parsimony. They cultivate the ground so close to the ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book itself. After reading it you will, I hope, not think me guilty of exaggeration when I call it, slight though it is, one for which its author has deserved well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... not relinquished; when the Executive, consulting the spirit of the community, receives the demands of the mob, and humbly complies, throwing down the fences of the law, that base rioters may walk unimpeded, to their work of vengeance, or unjust mercy? A sickly sentimentality too often enervates the administration of justice; and the pardoning power becomes the master-key to let out unwashed, unrepentant criminals. They have fleeced us, robbed us, and are ulcerous sores to the body politic; yet our heart ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... you will find the whole sexual life of men and women analyzed in its relationships to sin. Everything is set forth, as clearly and as concisely as it can be—without morbid prudery on the one hand, or morbid sentimentality on the other—in the coldest scientific language; the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may occur, and we are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal sin. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... art, and the people ought to hear it instead of the horrors which they cram into our ears under the pretence of satisfying our tastes. What pleases people most is sentimental music, but it need not be a silly sentimentality. Instead, they ought to give the people the charming airs which grow, as naturally as daisies on a lawn, in the vast field of opera-comique. That is not high art, it is true, but it is pretty music and it is high art compared with what is heard too often in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... said Mr. Wharton angrily, "for soft sentimentality. Well;—she must take her bed as she makes it. It is very hard on me, I know. Considering what she used to be, it is marvellous to me that she should have so little idea left of ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... heritage, and he ate and drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually he should grow "from within," directed by me, but ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... years before, a pyramid sixty feet high, which stood upon an acre of ground in the centre of an artificial lake. The two inscriptions that the prince chose for his sepulchre illustrate, appropriately enough, the sharply contrasting qualities of his strange individuality—his romantic sentimentality, and his callous cynicism. The first inscription was a line from ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... all silly sentimentality in the bud. The real thing is never silly," said Joyce out of her ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... when their business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... birdlime of words, and every time Amaury recites his Credo of Love, you are certain to see all round the drawing-room rows upon rows of little rosy mouths, eagerly opening, ready to swallow the taking bait of mawkish sentimentality. Just fancy! A poet who has such beautiful moustaches and who believes in love as he believes ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... Blake, following suit, in order to keep up her reputation for sentimentality; "I would thob ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "Except the last scene of the Broken Heart (which I think extravagant—others may think it sublime, and be right) they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong, which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster, he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the word would to many readers seem to imply a degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created Sandism, so true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil. This leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still, Sandism has its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases her assumption of superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-stocking of sentiment; and she is rather less of a bore, love to some extent ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... cleverest of the United's humorous writers. "To Charlie of the Comics" is a harmless parody on our Laureate's excellent poem "To Mary of the Movies", which appeared some time ago in The Piper. In "The Bride of the Sea", Mr. Lewis Theobald, Jr., presents a rather weird piece of romantic sentimentality of the sort afforded by bards of the early nineteenth century. The metre is regular, and no flagrant violations of grammatical or rhetorical precepts are to be discerned, yet the whole effort lacks clearness, dignity, inspiration, and poetic spontaneity. The word printed "enhanc'd" in ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself alike in childlike ways—in a passion for flowers, in that form of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics," from the Essay on Polygamy and Divorce. The least emotional of philosophers—a hard-headed Scotsman—he makes short work of the sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call ideal characters. I think their portrayal is mischievous; it is altogether offensive to me as an artist, and, as far as the morality goes, I believe that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and produces something that is extremely noxious as well as nauseous. I think that no man can consistently portray a probable type of human character without being useful to his readers. When he endeavors to create something higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... ensure the volume hundreds of possessors. The names of a few of the galaxy will give the reader a faint idea of their charms, unless the reader accord with Juliet's somewhat peevish "What's in a name." Thus, we find Julia, the queen of sentimentality; Belinda, gay and sparkling; Madeline, the early prey of despair; Lolah, languishing amid Eastern magnificence; the Orphan, pencilled in the very simplicity of nature, and finely contrasted with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is not its sternness but its sentimentality. There is no worse censorship than one which considers only the feelings of the spectators, except perhaps one which considers the feelings of people who do not even witness the performance. Take the case of the Passion Play at Oberammergau. The offence given by ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city—when for one day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops—to the wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous levity of Voltaire as something positively ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... range, in contemporary documents, this individual has about him little of romance and nothing whatever admirable. It would be a great pity, were mistaken sentimentality allowed to clothe him in the same bright-hued garments as the cavaliers of England in the time of the Stuarts. It would be an equal pity, were the casual reader to condemn all who eventually aligned themselves against ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... indulgently; but at heart she was discontented with Lavretsky, with Varvara Pavlovna, and with the whole scene she had prepared. Very little sentimentality had come of it; Varvara Pavlovna, in her opinion, ought to have flung ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is the less responsible for the production ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... comfortable advice.' He published it with a preface modestly explaining to the public his own sense of its imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem—the diffuseness of the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of which ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... you overcome me with your sentimentality. I don't believe in love. That's what I believe in," said he, as he opened his pocket-book and showed her ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Real happiness is a state of dulness Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey) Sham spiritualism She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling She herself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
