"Shrewdness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by now seemed to have recovered in part. He was looking at the boys in a peculiar way; Max could not decide on the spur of the moment whether it was wonder or shrewdness that he saw there as the predominant trait of the man's features. But at any rate, since he had recovered his breath to some extent, he should be capable of speaking, and explaining how it came about he found himself in ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... climax on climax, witty, ingenious, and so plausibly presented that we forget its departures from the possibilities of life. In "The Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the less to the life, certain sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their shrewdness and rascality and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness of their victims. We may object to the fact that the only person in the play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... stationary, or nearly so as became his high quality, he took the initiative in compliments, and had nearly every diplomatic man walking apart in the adjoining room, in a political aside, in less than twenty minutes. He had a countenance of shrewdness, and I make little doubt is a better man in a bureau than in a drawing-room. His colleague, the foreign minister, M. de Damas, and his wife, came next. He was a large, heavy-looking personage, that I suspect throws ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt The Countess dieted the vanity according to the nationality The letter had a smack of crabbed age hardly counterfeit The commonest things are the worst done The thrust sinned in its shrewdness The power to give and take flattery to any amount The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear Those numerous women who always know themselves to be right Thus does Love avenge himself on the unsatisfactory Past To be both generally blamed, and generally liked To ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he had married a woman without a penny, as gallantly as he had conquered his poverty and achieved his own independence, so bravely he went in and won the great City prize with a fortune of a quarter of a million. And every one of his old friends, and every honest-hearted fellow who likes to see shrewdness, and honesty, and courage succeed, was glad of his good fortune, and said, "Newcome, my boy" (or "Newcome, my buck," if they were old City cronies, and very familiar), "I ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
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