"Sycophantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bates, returned from his errand. He was experiencing "that stern joy" which bullies feel just before an encounter with a foeman inferior in strength, whom they expect easily to master. Several of the boys were near by—sycophantic followers of Jim, who were enjoying in advance the rumpus they expected. I am afraid schoolboys do not always sympathize with the weaker side. In the present instance, there was hardly a boy who had not at some time or other felt the weight of Jim's fist, and, as there is an old ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... of King Murat had returned to Naples, and he had informed his brother-in-law that the welfare of his own country rendered it necessary for him to forsake France. The very princes of the Confederation of the Rhine, hitherto the most sycophantic flatterers of the emperor, had likewise turned away from him; all the allies, adulators, and friends of his days of prosperity had left him, as rats desert the sinking ship. No one was in the throne-hall except the dignitaries and officers of France, and one-half of these came, perhaps, because ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... inferior to his will as Mr. Chief Justice Sewell. To see him in the street was to see him in the least, the lowest, and, consequently, the worst point of view. He was knowing, well read, and well bred. He could become sarcastic, but never condescended to be furious. If he was at all sycophantic, it was his will rather than his nature to be so. On the bench, he loomed large, being long in body, and looked stately and agreeable. He could be stern, but sternness was less natural to him than concealment. He never told all he knew, nor did his face ever ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... of famous faithful preachers, thereby wringing the bread of life out of the mouth of hungry, poor creatures, and forcibly cramming their throats with the lifeless, saltless, foisonless, lukewarm drammock of the fourteen false prelates, and their sycophantic, formal, carnal, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... from Sam's hideously contorted face furnished acute satisfaction. It fell naturally enough that little Steve Wickes, the timid, shrinking, humpbacked son of the dead soldier, Stephen Wickes, afforded Sam many opportunities of rare pleasure. It was Sam that coined and, with the aid of his sycophantic following never wanting to a bully, fastened to the child the nickname of "Humpy Wicksy," working thereby writhing agony in the lad's highly sensitive soul. But Sam did not stay his hand at the infliction of merely mental anguish. It was one of his favorite forms ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... excluded from the point of view. Probably the relation between spiritual terrors and man's power of propitiation, was the problem to which the word religion formed the answer. Religion meant apparently, in the infancies of the various idolatries, that latreia, or service of sycophantic fear, by which, as the most approved method of approach, man was able to conciliate the favor, or to buy off the malice of supernatural powers. In all Pagan nations, it is probable that religion would, an the whole, be a degrading influence; although ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... mystic. Those who met him in his last days were uneasily conscious that the second Bonaparte had died on the eve of Waterloo, leaving derelict his brother, a stout and commonplace man who was in turn sycophantic, choleric, and ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... subject, exhibiting the critics with blood and foam streaming from their jaws. In the original draft of the Advertisement to the same work he expresses himself as "proud of a book which has had the honour of being rancorously abused and execrated by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and EVERY POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS RENEGADE in Britain." A few years previously, Borrow had written to John Murray, "I have always myself. If you wish to please the public leave the matter [the revision of The Zincali] to me." {391a} From this ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... master of the world. When we remember the atmosphere of lies in which he lived,—as is the case with all absolute monarchs, especially in venal and corrupt times,—the unbounded temptations, the servile and sycophantic attentions of his courtiers, the perpetual vexations and cares incident to such overgrown and unlimited powers, and the disgust, satiety, and contempt which his experiences engendered, we can not ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... and painful as was the light which it had conceivably thrown on the problem that had baffled her for so long, she might have been even more acutely disgusted had she lingered on with the rest of the bridge-party in Mrs. Poppit's garden, so revolting was the sycophantic loyalty of the newly-decorated Member of the British Empire.... She described minutely her arrival at the Palace, her momentary nervousness as she entered the Throne-room, the instantaneousness with which that all vanished when she came face to ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson |
