"Sophistication" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night at the Banner Club he had kept his promise to Hattie Sterling and had gone often to meet her. She had taught him much, because it was to her advantage to do so. His greenness had dropped from him like a garment, but no amount of sophistication could make him deem the woman less perfect. He knew that she was much older than he, but he only took this fact as an additional sign of his prowess in having won her. He was proud of himself when he went behind the scenes at the theatre or waited for her at the stage ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... not due to her face, which had an expression of naive sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due to her dress, which, after ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... allowed to enter the soap pan without an analysis having first been made, as the oil may not only have become partially hydrolysed, involving a loss of glycerine, or contain albuminous matter rendering the soap liable to develop rancidity, but actual sophistication may have taken place. Thus a sample of tallow recently examined by the authors contained as much as 40 per cent. of an unsaponifiable wax, which would have led to disaster in the soap pan, had the bulk been used without examination. After ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... that there is not more nature in the present age, and less sophistication in society, and that mothers do not teach their daughters to fit themselves for wives and mothers? For they all seem to be setting traps to get husbands. Why, the young ladies of the present day are quite ashamed should they be ignorant ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... had done her hair high, and the wealth of it showed more, even, than when it was down in its accustomed braids. Her surprising black brows and lashes, with the innocence of her blue eyes, and the half-wistful, half-daring expression she had, made her seem a combination of sophistication and childishness such as ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... a chance to thunder, immediately engaged the newcomer in conversation. Paris and its theaters served admirably as a theme. Lois clearly knew her Paris well; and she had met Rostand—at a garden party—and spoke of the contemporaneous French drama with the light touch of sophistication. French phrases slipped from her tongue trippingly, and added to her charm and mystery, her fellowship with another and wider world. From Hastings she turned to embrace them all in her talk. The immobile countenances of ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... taxicab, a taxicab apparently being the open sesame. One might have gone afoot and have looked ever so much like a "good thing" and he would not have been admitted. But such is the simplicity of the sophistication of the keepers of such places that a motor car opens ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... bounded, one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the courage of naivete. He subtracts nothing from the common realities of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves it intact. The ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... matrimony; junction &c 43; combination &c 48; miscegenation. impregnation; infusion, diffusion suffusion, transfusion; infiltration; seasoning, sprinkling, interlarding; interpolation; &c 228 adulteration, sophistication. [Thing mixed] tinge, tincture, touch, dash, smack, sprinkling, spice, seasoning, infusion, soupcon. [Compound resulting from mixture] alloy, amalgam; brass, chowchow^, pewter; magma, half-and-half, melange, tertium quid [Lat.], miscellany, ambigu^, medley, mess, hotchpot^, pasticcio^, patchwork, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a stout old priest. The priest had opened the door rather stingily and appeared half- heartedly to dismiss him. But the peddler held up something I couldn't see; the priest wavered with a timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I should have liked to enter ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... French Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotist Rousseau. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... to sophistication, with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... leave her much attention for other people's. She had only noticed that Helen had been kind to Franklin. She suspected that it was now his ingenuousness that idealised Helen's tolerant kindness. But though her superior sophistication made a little touch of irony unavoidable, it was overwhelmed in the ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... much true and sound policy, so much delightfull and pertinent history, so many liuely descriptions of the shipping and wares in his time of all the nations almost in Christendome, and such a subtile discouery of outlandish merchants fraud, and of the sophistication of their wares, that needes you must acknowledge, that more matter and substance could in no wise be comprised in so little a roome. [Footnote: The poem here alluded to was written between 1416 and 1438, as ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication which comes from daily contact with the artificial ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... of course, that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to. It is a credit to our human nature, not a blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "Twain and one flesh" and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the Golden Age. Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity of an age when all men—including kings and philosophers—were shepherds. With reservations, the first group tended to prefer Theocritus and Spenser; and the second, Virgil. Hence, too, the first group approved of Philips' efforts to create a ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... a lark. She chattered with the childish artlessness that at times veiled her sophistication. Jack was given to understand that she loved to be natural and simple, that she detested the shams of social convention to which she was made to conform. Her big lovely eyes were wistful in their earnestness as they met his. It was not wholly a pose with her. For the moment she meant all she said. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... book I have generally kept as truly to the original as I could, including when Browne's (or possibly his editors') conventions for the use of quotes and parentheses set my teeth on edge. However, for lack of convenient font characters and sophistication of scanning software, I have converted most of the vulgar fractions to decimals. The others I have represented with slashes, so that say, a value of one third might appear as 1/3. Similarly, I have split ligatured ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and without, he smells, he rots, he starves. Forty is a great age for him. He is as full of artifice as his civilized brother, only not so wise. As for his moral integrity, let the curious inquirer seek an account of the Tasmanian, or the Australian, or the Polynesian before "sophistication" came. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... in with an air of amused sophistication: "I think the parlor aviator was right. Really, you know, aviation is too difficult a subject for the layman to make any predictions about—either what it can or ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... in his "Black Forest Village Tales" (1843, 1853, 1854), discarded the healthful but unflattering realism of Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), and chosen, with a half-didactic purpose, to contrast the peasant's honest rudeness and straightforwardness with the refined sophistication and hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... lingered longer than usual in the woods and copses where they dwelt. In the gardens some of the spring blossoms had already unfolded. The wallflowers and polyanthuses had looked out again, unhesitatingly, on the genial sky—deprived, by sophistication and culture, of the instincts necessary to their preservation: the wild untutored denizens of the field and the quiet woods rarely betray such lack of presentiment. But such are everywhere the results of civilisation; which, however beneficial to society in the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... much sophistication, not to say conventionalised affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication. Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice, the concrete incidence, of this national attachment ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication, her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him involuntarily; there ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Resident Destinyworker. "All right, Althea, I'll give him a week's dream kinesis if you insist but just remember the Sophistication Curve in the Twentieth. You'll probably have to supplement it with ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight
... neck and shoulders with a singularly strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see, matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what appeared to be extreme sophistication. After the shock of the tie the loose gray London worsted coat and trousers made only a passing impression; and from my involuntary summary of the whole surprising man, which had taken less than an instant, my dazed brain came back and was held ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... young a poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred. "Johannes Agricola" is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. In its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty, "Porphyria" is still ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in, glazing her over and her speech, which carried the whir ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... pulse beat increases, and with stifled rage he rushes into the battle. It is the fourteenth prelude in the sinister key of E flat minor, and its heavy, sullen-arched triplets recalls for Niecks the last movement of the B flat minor Sonata; but there is less interrogation in the prelude, less sophistication, and the heat of conflict over it all. There is not a break in the clouds until the beginning of the fifteenth, the familiar ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... old; he had told some new-made friends in Willets that he was thirty-five. But he looked older, for a certain blase sophistication that shone from his eyes and sat on the curves of his lips, did much to create the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... early May; and so, liking the place passing well, I determined to sleep there and soon found a hospitable cottage. In the morning I liked the place better still, and remembering the "tarmac" and the sophistication (alas!) of Steyning, I decided to stay where I was two or three days and to visit thence a place in the Weald it had long been my desire to see. And so having made up my mind, before nine o'clock I set ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... are or are not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... had an instinct for the truth in its purest sense, the innate impulse toward the verities unspoiled by the taint of sophistication. Perhaps in the restricted conditions of her life she had never before had adequate temptation to a subterfuge. Even now, consciously reddening, her eyes drooping before the combined gaze of her little world, she had an inward protest of the literal exactness ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... view, and certainly people have their own and widely varying views of automobiling. In the presence of the machine people everywhere become for the time-being childlike and naive, curious and enthusiastic; they lose the veneer of sophistication, and are as approachable and companionable as children. Automobiling is therefore doubly delightful in these early days of the sport. By and by, when the people become accustomed to the machine, they will resume their habit of indifference, and we shall see as little of them as ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... and Whitworth developed machine tools of increasing size and truth. The design of other machinery kept pace with—sometimes just behind, sometimes just ahead of—the capacity and capability of machine tools. In general, there was an increasing sophistication of mechanisms that could only be accounted for by an increase of information with which ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... said, "we have no quarrel with you. You are an avowed aristocrat, and we respect your candor. Our quarrel is with democrats who will not trust their own doctrines." Again he smiled with as much sophistication as such a placid face could achieve, and that was all. I believe Mr. Taft has lately modified his attitude toward women voting. I do not know how he squares that with his ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... Nancy in an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the innocent and the defenceless. Hilda was strangely ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett |
