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More "Conceit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... particular order, and are given to a poet with a subject, on which he must write verses ending in the same rhymes, disposed in the same order. Menage gives the following account of the origin of this ridiculous conceit. Dulot, (a poet of the 17th century,) was one day complaining in a large company, that 300 sonnets had been stolen from him. One of the company expressing his astonishment at the number, "Oh," said he, "they are blank sonnets, or rhymes (bouts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... please,' he answered, shrugging his shoulders, and assuming in a breath a mask of humility which sat as ill on his monstrous conceit as ever nun's veil on a trooper. 'Yet it may even be I; by the favour of the Holy Catholic Church, whose humble ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... sold in Paule's church-yard, at the signe of the Holy Ghost, 1608," 12mo. he thus concludes his address to the studious and well affected reader:—"And thus, gentle Reader, hauing acquainted thee with my long, costly, and laborious Collections, not written at adventure, or by an imaginary conceit in a Scholler's priuate Studie, but wrung out of the earth, by the painfull hand of experience: and hauing also giuen thee a touch of Nature, whom no man as yet euer durst send naked into the worlde without her veyle; and expecting, by thy good entertainement of ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... proposition some day if we can chain down some of his conceit. Only, where such friendships with him and Bleema comes in, I don't ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... conceit, while he took her hand as he spoke, and admired the ring. The white, warm hand ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... you speak, Alison," she said, "one would think that you were somebody of consequence to Mr. Hardy. Oh, dear—oh, dear, the conceit of some folks! Do you suppose it would make any difference to him whether you came or not? But take my word for it, I won't ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... One may be courageous to handle both the traditions and the novelties of men, and yet be modest before the solemn mysteries of fate and nature. He may place no veil before his eyes and no finger on his lips in presence of popular dogmas, and yet shrink from the conceit of esteeming his mind a mirror of the universe. Ideas, like coins, bear the stamp of the age and brain they were struck in. Many a phantom which ought to have vanished at the first cock crowing of reason still holds its seat on the oppressed heart ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... any of his measures, any farther than La Salle might deem it expedient to consult him or any other of his subordinates. With views so different, a speedy quarrel was inevitable. Beaujeu is represented as a man full of conceit, of narrow mind, and very irritable. La Salle was reserved, self-reliant, keeping his own counsel. Scarcely had the two men met, before they found themselves in antagonism. Before the vessels sailed, Beaujeu wrote to the king's minister ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... "For fiddlesticks! For conceit and vanity and vainglory. Go away! My head is fit to split. Natalina, why haven't you given me my smelling salts? And why will you ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... mistaken at the first glance for either. Indeed it would have been difficult, on a much closer acquaintance, to describe it in any more satisfactory terms than as a mixed expression of vulgar cunning and conceit. This gentleman wore a rather broad-brimmed hat for the greater wisdom of his appearance; and had his arms folded for the greater impressiveness of his attitude. He was somewhat shabbily dressed in a blue surtout reaching nearly to his ankles, short loose trousers of the same colour, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... people, if they had been on the lookout for a King, might have gone farther and fared worse,—but the four Georges had somehow got them out of conceit with the word "King," and William, the Sailor, had not quite reconciled them to it;—then they were jealous of foreigners, and last, but not least, there were apprehensions that the larger title would necessitate a larger ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... "scholars" and scholiasts—native Sanskritists and archeologists are often spoken of as "Calcutta" and "Indian sciolists"—affords no proof of their real inferiority, but rather of the wisdom of the Chinese proverb that "self-conceit ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... even death, to one or more of his victims. To save them from such a fate, he talked of suicide. All this was highly romantic, fearfully melodramatic, and even mysteriously tragic. But, unfortunately for Jack's self-conceit, the event did not coincide with these highly-colored views. The ladies refused to break their hearts. Those organs, however susceptible and tender they may have been, beat bravely on. Number Three viewed him with indifference. Miss Phillips coolly and contemptuously ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again with "shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... going West to reduce the aboriginal population; I hope we shall have no trouble with the red men. When we get among the people who have always lived there, such a title will make us ridiculous, for it smacks of conceit; it ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... to be havin', though 'tis fine to see a man like yourself hasn't too much conceit of his clothes. But now have ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... and smooth this morning; There's some conceit or other likes him well When that he bids good morrow with such spirit. I think there's ne'er a man in Christendom Can lesser hide his love or hate than he; For by his face straight shall you ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... to use before. He began to drop opinions and information to Kent in a superior sort of way. On the fourth day word came that Doctor Cardigan would not return for another forty-eight hours, and with unblushing conceit Mercer intimated that when he did return he would find big changes. Then it was that in the stupidity of his ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... that I learned out of the King's last proclamation, the most prudent and best applied remedy for this offense, if it shall please his Majesty to use it, that the wit of man can devise. This offense, my lords, is grounded upon a false conceit of honor; and therefore it would be punished in the same kind, in eo quis rectissime plectitur, in quo peccat. The fountain of honor is the King and his aspect, and the access to his person continueth honor in life, and to be banished from his presence is one of the greatest eclipses ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope in vacuo, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an agreeable girl whose great failing was her self-conceit. She was sure she could do everything anybody could do. As she did not look down on other people's efforts, she was amusing rather than annoying. She was always ready to write a poem, or sing a song, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... such eyes. Don't tell ME! A man who has been about town since the reign of George IV., ought he not to know better than you young lads who have seen nothing? The deterioration of women is lamentable; and the conceit of the young fellows more lamentable still, that they won't see this fact, but persist in thinking their time ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... visible on the snow. St. Thomas Becket, they say, was sometime a cure priest at Winter-bourn, and did use to goe along this path up to a chapell in Clarendon Parke, to say masse, and very likely 'tis true: but I have a conceit that this path is caused by a warme subterraneous steame from a long crack in the earth, which may cause snow to dissolve sooner there than elsewhere: and consequently gives the dissolving snow a darker colour, just as wee see the difference of ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... jewellery; she has no weakness for tinsel. What she wears is good of its kind, even when it is not costly. Wherever she goes, she impresses everyone with the fact that she is a true gentlewoman. She knows what is suited to her station and age, and, without conceit, understands what are her "points." She is well aware that no woman can afford to be indifferent to her personal appearance, and that no law, human or divine, requires her to disfigure herself. A married woman has to bear in mind that she must dress not only to please her husband, but ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be. In short, with all sorts of cavilers, it was best, both for them and everybody, that whoever had the true light should stick behind the secure ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... scrapes, once, as has been shown, kept from suicide by a mere accident, and was now reduced to the alternative of beggary or of marrying for a living. None of these circumstances, which would have taken the conceit out of most men, at all impaired his opinion of his talent and sharpness. Replying to my observation merely by a slight shrug and smile of pity for the man who thus misappreciated his foresight, he again produced his pocket-book, and extracted from its innermost recesses a fragment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... turned a look of indifference on the shrimp beside her. Had he possessed the soul of a real man, he would have shriveled; but, being oblivious to all things save the pride of wealth and monstrous self-conceit, he merely snickered and reached for his cocktail—which, by the way, he was absorbing ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... ask the reason of our dissensions of today, in a difference of interests, because such difference does not exist, but try to find it in the arrogance and the conceit of the two nations. We do not recognize you as a nation. But this recognition must be made with the understanding ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... said Mark, and he gave his cousin a meaning look, which was returned, the latter saying to himself, "It takes some of the conceit out of ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... the further enhancement of his social reputation. He returned in two years with a fashionable figure, a most recherche style of dress, moustachios of the most approved cut, and whiskers of faultless curl—a finished gentleman in his own conceit. With such attractions, the prestige which he derived from his reported travels and long residence abroad, and the savoir faire of one who had made the conventional arrangements of society his study, he quickly arose to the summit of his wishes, to the point which it had been his life's ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful self-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated in the chapters on "Women and Marriage," "To a Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage," but I thought the author very wise indeed, and found many other pages which were intensely stimulating. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... boys liked him for his bright and gentle yet very firm ways; the parents, for getting their children on, and helping them to be steady; and the clergyman, for being so perfectly to be trusted, so anxious to do right, and, while efficient and well informed, perfectly humble and free from conceit. Now he has just got an appointment to Hazleford school, in another diocese, with a salary of fifty pounds a year; but, as Charles Hayward would tell you, 'he hasn't got one bit of pride, no more than when he lived up in ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... connexion betwixt cause and effect, makes us here infer a dependence of every quality on the unknown substance. The custom of imagining a dependence has the same effect as the custom of observing it would have. This conceit, however, is no more reasonable than any of the foregoing. Every quality being a distinct thing from another, may be conceived to exist apart, and may exist apart, not only from every other quality, but from that unintelligible chimera ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... British are not in manner a winning people. Their self-conceit is the principal reason. They have solid and excellent qualities, but their self-complacency is exorbitant and unparalleled. The majority are not content with esteeming Marlborough and Wellington the greatest Generals and Nelson the first Admiral the world ever ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... it is not always detected. Great genius and force of character undoubtedly make their own career. But because Walter Scott was dull at school, is a parent to see with joy that his son is a dunce? Because Lord Chatham was of a towering conceit, must we infer that pompous vanity portends a comprehensive statesmanship that will fill the world with the splendor of its triumphs? Because Sir Robert Walpole gambled and swore and boozed at Houghton, are we to suppose that gross sensuality ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... is a memorial of his own life; a relic suggesting an earlier opulence. He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the pockets ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... have this peculiar mark on their breasts. Never, from that time to this, has any ostrich been able to fly. But even this has not entirely subdued their pride and arrogance, and their insufferable conceit. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... to a slowly gnawing torture, for any train might bring over an army man to administer the oaths of allegiance, and there would then be no escape. But as weeks passed and nothing happened he began to breathe more hopefully. The depression, born of fear, was wearing off, while the self-satisfied conceit slunk back into its former place. It would have been safe to say that Jeb was close ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... if I ever do. We new people are only in demand when there is a vote to be taken. We are put on minor committees, and are thankful for any crumbs that fall from the great man's table. I am a very small spar in the ship of state. It takes all the conceit out of a fellow when he finds how little he amounts to in Washington. He leaves his own part of the world a giant, puffed up with pride and importance; but the shrinking process begins as soon as the train rolls out of the home depot. It comes on like ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... lives in the struggle to acquire or maintain a position can appreciate this social luxury. The sea exercises a delightful influence over the character—its perils induce self-reliance and fearlessness, which are redeemed from conceit by a child-like simplicity arising naturally from the contemplation of an element menacing, invincible, and symbolical of eternity. Then, too, the legends of the sea invest the mind with a sensitive, poetic passion as delightful as it is unworldly, as reverent as it is credulous. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions of others includes some dramas which have not been preserved, as the company to which Shakespeare was attached ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... must say," replied Mary Connynge, with indirection, "that I fancy the other far more, he being not so forward, nor so full of pure conceit. I like not a man so confident." This with an eye cast down, as much as though there were present in the room some man subject ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... a good conceit of himself from the conspicuous position achieved so unexpectedly, the morning papers did nothing to allay it. Most of them slurred over, as lightly as possible, the fact of his journalistic connection; as in the evening editions, the yacht feature was ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... beginning—displayed by the Whigs and by most of those with whom Burke had acted in politics, had an unfortunate effect on his temper. He broke off his friendship with Fox and others of his oldest associates and greatest admirers. He became hopeless and out of conceit with the world around him. One might have set down some of this at least to the effect of advancing years and declining health, if such onslaughts on revolutionary ideas as his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' and his 'Letters on a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... on the Pool of Bethesda: "While I am coming, another steppeth down before me." The verse seems as if it were made on purpose for me; what a pity nobody else will understand it!' And he smiled quietly at the conceit, as he got the scented sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport. For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil remarked by the philosophers and moralists of all ages. Their absurd presumption in their own good fortune has been less taken notice of. It is, however, if possible, still more universal. There is no ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... do a trick, to prove how clever they are. I believe that is the way ninety per cent of the boys and girls go wrong, and instead of teaching them the Bible, why not try reducing the size of their conceit and their disposition to boast. I just wonder how far wrong ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... change and exhilaration which hunting brings in its train. The whole countryside enjoys a wholesome tonic by the frequent visits of the hounds, and the well-equipped company with them. Nothing cheers up the village, or cures the influenza, or brings oblivion of war news, or puts every one into conceit with themselves, so quickly, or leaves such a glow of sound satisfaction behind it. It would be odd if it did not, considering the amount of time, money, and trouble spent before the pack trots up to the green before the old grey church at eleven on a February morning. ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... to the possibility of James having some of the self- conceit taken out of him; but then the squire's son interpreted the remark as a compliment. "Have you ever thought of going to college, Herbert?" asked Cameron, turning ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... This conceit struck popular fancy as plain argument could not have done, and the Republican party came to be called "Robbie Miller's Hoe "—an imperfect means of reaching a great end, and one that any one might use without becoming responsible for ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... not wish to see the great lighted yacht which illuminated the whole harbour. It had not occurred to her that she ought to say, "Don't trouble to come with me. I shall do very well alone." She took it for granted not only that he would come, but that he would be glad to come; and there was no conceit in this tacit assumption. It was borne in upon her mind from his, as if ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... onerous offices; they may operate upon the people to whom they relate; but no province can confer provincial privileges on itself. They may have a right to all which the king has given them; but it is a conceit of the other hemisphere, that men have a right to all which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... cake of delicious-looking soap on its sliding rack across the bath. He looked as a man in a fairy-story might look. It was as if an enchanted palace, with the princess just round the corner, had been offered him. Smiling at the conceit, he turned to the man. "I didn't notice the telephone," he said; "I suppose it ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... jargon and conceit, With tongue as prompt to lie as The veriest mountebank and cheat, Steps forth the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... to an enormous and original simplicity. Nothing has been worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it; without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the history. In A Woman is a Weathercock, III, iii, printed in 1612, but written earlier, one of the actors exclaims of an insufferable pun: "O Newington Conceit!" The fact that this sneer is the only reference to the Newington Playhouse found in contemporary literature is a commentary on the low esteem in which the building was held by the Elizabethans, and its relative unimportance for the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... dominion of this dogma, education was absolutely forbidden him. It became a crime even to attempt to educate this tertium quid which was regarded as little more than brute and little less than human. The white race, in its arrogant conceit, constituted the personalities and the Negro the instrumentalities. Man may be defined as a distinction-making animal. He is ever prone to set up barriers between members of his own species and to deny one part of God's human creatures the inalienable ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... who God is, and who man is. Thou lovest God? Then, if thou lovest Him, thou must needs love all that He has made. And what has He made? All things, except sin; and what sin is He has told thee. He has given thee ten commandments, and let no man give thee an eleventh commandment out of his own conceit and will worship; calling unclean what God hath made clean, and cursing what God hath blessed. Thou lovest God? Then thou lovest all that is good; for God is good, and from Him all good things come. But what is good? All is good except sin; for it is written, "God saw every thing ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... old? Ah woful Ere, Which tells me, Youth's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit— It cannot be, that Thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd:— And thou wert aye a masker bold! What strange disguise hast now put on, To make believe, that Thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But springtide ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... addition to the sum of 100 ducats already promised him as further recognition of his valor, he should receive a house with good will attached; that is, a shop in some growing business section. "His petitions to the municipal council", writes M. Bermann[66], "are amazing examples of measureless self-conceit and the boldest greed. He seemed determined to get the utmost out of his own self-sacrifice. He insisted upon the most highly deserved reward, such as the Romans bestowed upon their Curtius, the Lacedaemonians upon their Pompilius, the Athenians upon ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" "I shall like no laughing," said Feeble-mind; "I shall like no gay attire; I shall like no unprofitable questions." I think it took some self-conceit to refuse to sit at table beside Christiana because of her gay attire. And I hope Mercy did not give up dressing well, even after she was married, to please that weak-minded old churl. And as to unprofitable questions—we are all tempted to think that question unprofitable ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... seemed to be filled with great thoughts which would make him famous. Over and over again he said to himself: "The rain pours and the people down below chuckle as they move about each under his little umbrella of self-conceit. They look up to the mountain, saying, 'The fool! Why looks he so high? He is lost in the mists up there, and he might be safe and dry with us.' But the mountain has over him the arch of the universe, and sleeps calmly in the sun of truth. Little recks he of ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... woman had to stop here for a moment to chuckle at her own conceit, but her poor son did not respond. He had got far beyond the point where a perception ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... answer for the silent operations that take place in other men's minds, but in my own, even under the greatest misfortunes a droll conceit will more rally my crushed spirits than all the moral consolations ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... thirty-five years ago. Combined with this goes the fact that though I know the days of my stay on earth are greatly reduced, I seem to be less rather than more anxious about "the morrow." For though time has rounded off the corners of my conceit, experience of God's dealing with such an unworthy midget as myself has so strengthened the foundations on which faith stood, that Christ now means more to me as a living Presence than when I laid more emphasis on ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... time. Something like this must be the explanation; and I confess to you, Padre, that the failure of the prince to keep our tryst was the biggest disappointment and the sharpest humiliation of my life. It took most of the conceit out of me, and since then I've never been vain of my alleged "looks" or "charm" for more than two minutes on end. I've invariably said to myself, "Remember Jim Wyndham, and how he didn't think you worth the bother ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... genesis of a generalization that gives the less critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge, of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill," Casanova's Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius Petronius, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of conventional dignity and smooth decorum may think to despatch Fuller's claims by denominating him a quaint writer. This would be what is vulgarly called a snap-judgment indeed. His quaintness never runs into superficial conceit, but embodies always a deep and comprehensive wisdom. He insinuates truth with a friendly indirectness, and banters us out of our folly with a foreign instance. Plutarch or Montaigne is not more happy in historical parallels, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... but—Resolution number two—I, Una Sackville, solemnly vow to speak the plain truth about my own feelings in this book, and not cover them up with a cloak of fine words—I think there's a big sprinkling of conceit in my feelings. I do like being the Squire's daughter, and having people stare at me as I go through the town, and rush about to attend to me when I enter a shop. Ours is only a little bit of a ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... the Devil's Ware-house, he has two constant Warehouse-keepers, Pride and Conceit, and these are always at the Door, showing their Wares, and exposing the pretended Vertues and Accomplishments of the Man, by way ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... gentleman, devoted to husbandry, and deep in platforms of hop gardens,[14]—a baronet, whose name for upwards of a century has been used as a synonyme for incurable political bigotry,[15]—a little, crooked, and now forgotten man, who died, as his biographer tells us, "distracted, occasioned by a deep conceit of his own parts, and by a continual bibbing of strong and high tasted liquors,"[16]—and last, but not least assuredly, of one who was by turns a fanatical preacher and an obscure practitioner of physic, and who passed his old age at Clitheroe in Lancashire in attempting to transmute ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... good motive," he said, "and I don't know that I ought to increase any boy's stock of conceit. It is usually quite big enough. But maybe you won't catch anything, and I'll ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... from my reverie with a laugh at Thorndyke's quaint conceit and a glance at the grotesquely distorted reflection of my face in the ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... on the voyage. For my own part, I enjoyed the stormy days, the howling winds and the infuriated waves dashing impotently over the steamer. They filled me with a sense of conflict and of amusement. It is always good to see man triumphing over the murderous forces of nature. It puts one in conceit ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... because it takes pleasure only in the element of ill-will and evil speech; he who indulges in this, soon becomes indifferent to God, contemptuous toward the world, and a hater of his fellows; but the true, genuine, indispensable feeling of self-respect is ruined in conceit and presumption." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... here below, but the Elements themselves, and all the other Parts of the Universe, are compos'd of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury; yet the learned Sennertus, and all the more wary Chymists, have rejected that conceit, and do many of them confess, that the Tria Prima are each of them made up of the four Elements; and others of them make Earth and Water concur with Salt, Sulphur and Mercury, to the Constitution of ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous, more elusive and more persistent moral troubles—HYPOCRISY, CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big fellows—murder and theft—shall have ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... nameless forgotten multitudes; and life lay before him rather as something definite, which he could take up and fashion to his own pleasure, than as a succession of days and years which would inevitably mould and influence him in their course. It is not wholly conceit, perhaps, which so assures these clever lads of the vastness of their untried capabilities, that there are moments when they feel as if they could grasp heaven and earth in their wide consciousness; it is rather a want of experience and clearness of perception. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... passion at all, it is your WILL. It's your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven't got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to their prejudices, and little toys which they call gris, gris. It would be improper therefore to take them from them, or even speak of them to them; for they would believe themselves undone, if they were stripped of those trinkets. The old negroes soon make them lose conceit of them. ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... wonderful thing it is; and it shows how little I know of the wonders of nature, in spite of forty years' honest labour. I was just telling you that there could be no such creatures; and, behold! here is one come to confound my conceit and show me that Nature can do, and has done, beyond all that man's poor fancy can imagine. So, let us thank the Maker, and Inspirer, and Lord of Nature for all His wonderful and glorious works, and try ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... have pictured her. The smile lost itself in the shame with which the memory of her ignorance and prejudice filled her. How well Hadassah and her husband could afford to forget the narrow-mindedness and the conceit of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... war were commemorated in songs which this Briton declared—and no doubt truthfully—to be "frothy, senseless bombast." But whatever limitations of culture were disclosed by this outburst of national conceit, no one could doubt for an instant that an exuberant vitality was coursing through the veins ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... so highly content them, that upon the Sunday next following the marriage was very worthily solemnised, and they lived and loved together very kindly. Thus the Divine bounty, out of the malignant enemy's secret machinations, can cause good effects to arise and succeed. For from this conceit of fearful imagination in her, not only happened this long-desired conversion of a maid so obstinately scornful and proud, but likewise all the women of Ravenna, being admonished by her example, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... replied his wife, "perfect! I never saw a house furnished with so much taste. I declare it has put me half out of conceit with things at home. Oh, dear! how common every thing ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... debauchery, a debauchery both secret and alarming, for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... you out of conceit with Castile, you are not likely to be put in again by Palencia; for a second-rate town in this kingdom is like a piece of the plain enclosed by a wall, and only emphasises the desolation at the expense of the freedom; ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... a long pause. The girls had been thrilled with the simple recital, so void of anything like conceit in the part that Denny himself had played in the ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... the thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely alone; who gave up every old friend, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... steadily diminishing. Other nations feel a universal distrust and dislike toward Germany. So great is this antipathy that the Germans imagine there is a malignant conspiracy against them. An upstart nation, suddenly wealthy and powerful, Germany has developed an inordinate self-conceit and self-assertion. The German glories in being a realist. He thinks only of political power and colonial expansion. Might is the supreme test of right. He constantly emphasizes the indelible character of the German race. Germans are suffering from "acute megalomania." They think the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... that. It's curious how I feel about the English, Philip. They've got such a conceit that they irritate me terribly at times, yet I don't want to see them beaten by any other Europeans. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the barber to me, 'this man simply raves, as you will have observed. Every baker and tailor knows more in his own conceit of bleeding than a barber of fifteen years' experience like myself. They are able to pass judgment as to the question of too much or too little without hesitation and with the utmost exactness. It is ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... resolv'd, sweet friends and followers! These lords perhaps do scorn our estimates, And think we prattle with distemper'd spirits: But, since they measure our deserts so mean, That in conceit [36] bear empires on our spears, Affecting thoughts coequal with the clouds, They shall be kept our forced followers Till with their eyes they view ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... self-conceit of human nature! Here was this ruffian proclaiming the limitations of Valmont, who half an hour before had shaken his hand within the innermost circle of his order! Yet my heart warmed towards the wretch who had remembered me ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... world of young men there was no greener or more simple Simon than I, Hugo Gottfried, as, playing a tune on the pipe of my own conceit, I marched up the High Street of Thorn to the entrance ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the long months of arduous training he had undergone himself before he had been considered sufficiently adept to be considered a finished flier, smiled at the conceit of the ignorant African who was already demanding that he be permitted to ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the article begins, "whose memoirs are now before us, appears to have possessed good abilities, and originally a good disposition, but, with an overweening conceit of herself, much obstinacy and self-will, and a disposition to run counter to established practices and opinions. Her conduct in the early part of her life was blameless, if not exemplary; but the latter part ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Multiplicand, Sara thought they were the most pompous lot she had ever seen. However, since they were officers and units, she could imagine that they might have some excuse; but what possible excuse could there be for conceit in the Fractions, every one of whom had something missing about him? Some of them, of course, lacked only an ear or a little finger; but numbers of them had only one leg or one arm, and many of them were much worse off! Why, at ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... licentious [s]faining, and so put off as vaine fictions; yet seeing they deliuer nothing herein but that which was well knowne and vsuall in those times wherein they liued, they are not slightly, and vpon an imagined conceit, to be reiected: for they affirme no more then is manifest in the records of most approued Histories, whose essence is and must be [t]truth, [u]as straightnesse of a rule, or else deserue not that title. In which wee reade ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... people in and near Manchester, and they had also been excited to acts of desperation and violence, by some of those who professed to be their leaders. As for Johnson, the brush-maker, he was a composition of vanity, emptiness, and conceit, such as I never before saw concentrated in one person. It was the most ridiculous thing in the world to see him assuming the most pompous and lofty tone, while every one about him did not fail openly to express ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... coming, because I saw the pigeons were flying up from the valley below; and as dried venison won't do after a morning trip, why, I took the rifle to kill a beast out of my flock" The hunter grinned at his conceit. "You see," he continued, "this place of mine is a genuine spot for a hunter. Every morning, from my threshold, I can shoot a deer, a bear, or a turkey. I can't abide living in a country where an honest man must ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... his guest, and desired to know the nature of the particular business he had mentioned to his servant. 'This bond, sir,' said Satan, significantly. 'This bond? what of it, pray? It seems all right.' 'Is not that your signature?' 'I admit it.' 'Signed in your blood?' 'A conceit of your own; I told you at the time that ink was just as good in law.' 'It is past due, seven minutes and fourteen seconds.' 'So it is, I declare! but what of that?' 'I demand payment.' 'Nonsense! no one ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... badly-starched shirt-collar almost obscured his eyes. We shall never be able to claim any credit as a physiognomist again, for, after a careful scrutiny of this gentleman's countenance, we had come to the conclusion that it bespoke nothing but conceit and silliness, when our friend with the silver staff whispered in our ear that he was no other than a doctor of civil law, and heaven knows what besides. So of course we were mistaken, and he must ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... it is well if for no other purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the professional early riser who, were he in a state of perfect health, would not be the wandering victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are few small things more exasperating than this early bird with the worm of his conceit in his bill. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a man has come to understand what we have a right to mean by space, it does not imply a boundless conceit on his part to hazard the statement that space is infinite. When he has said this, he has said very little. What shall we say to the statement ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... not doubt there would be other foc'sles, and soon. Life ashore at the Knitting Swede's was not for me. Young fool, I was, with all the conceit of my years and inches. Yet I realized clearly enough I would only be happy with the feel of a deck beneath my feet, and the breath of open water in my nostrils. I was of the sea, and for the sea. And if anything were needed to make my decision ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... thus to refuse what the King wished to give me (for everything was done in the King's name), while so many of my equals in rank and dignity were running after these shares. I replied that such conduct would be that of a fool, the conduct of impertinence, rather than of conceit; that it was not mine, and that since he pressed me so much I would tell him my reasons. They were, that since the fable of Midas, I had nowhere read, still less seen, that anybody had the faculty of converting into gold all he touched; that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... at this quaint conceit, and then rode on quickly. In a few minutes he stopped and listened again, but heard no noise save the loud breathing ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... spectacles one day when she and Susan walked together in the "crocodile" along a dull country lane. "A regular black, cringing slave—and what thanks do you get for it, I'd like to know? None! Not one little scrap. She's such a bat of self-conceit that she doesn't even know that she is helped. If you did a hundredth part as much for other people they'd go ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... as gallant as before; none but Grace observed the faint change in his manner. She was sure she could distinguish a change, yet at times, when he was gayest, she thrilled with the hope that her belief was the outgrowth of a conceit which she was beginning for the first time to know she possessed. Then came the belief again and the belief was stronger than the doubt. She could ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... the soutar's door: he saw it open and Maggie appear. For a moment he flattered himself she was coming to look for him, in order to tell him how sorry she was for her late behaviour to him. But her start when first she became aware of his presence, did not fail, notwithstanding his conceit, to satisfy him that such was not her intent. He made haste ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... coxcombs might fine-draw over a brace of small octavos. As it stands, the story is gracefully, yet energetically told, and is entitled to the place it occupies. The author of Pelham (vide the newspapers) has a pleasant conceit in the shape of a whole-length of fashion, which, being the best and shortest in its line that we have met with, will serve ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... looking fine. You always were a handsome youngster but you're—you're improving, young man. I'm blessed if you don't look like a work of art done in bronze." He laughed with the pleasure of his own conceit and ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... mine," and made his Eve thus reverently submissive to her Adam, he little thought of bright girls in the nineteenth century, well versed in science, philosophy, and the languages, sitting in the senior class of a college of the American republic, laughing his male conceit ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... happiness) constitute self-regard (solipsismus). This is either the self-love that consists in an excessive fondness for oneself (philautia), or satisfaction with oneself (arrogantia). The former is called particularly selfishness; the latter self-conceit. Pure practical reason only checks selfishness, looking on it as natural and active in us even prior to the moral law, so far as to limit it to the condition of agreement with this law, and then it is called rational self-love. But self-conceit ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... called his little brothers, I have only to point out here that nothing could be more despicably superstitious in the opinion of a vivisector than the notion that science recognizes any such step in evolution as the step from a physical organism to an immortal soul. That conceit has been taken out of all our men of science, and out of all our doctors, by the evolutionists; and when it is considered how completely obsessed biological science has become in our days, not by the full scope of evolution, but by that particular method ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... enlighten the minds of his compatriots, and to be a blessing to his country; although, if any one had asked me how I had deserved to be held in such high esteem, I could not have found an answer! Oh, vanity and conceit! How easily you are caught in ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... not good enough to compensate for the mischief they did him. He spoke his own language with purity: he had some merit, but more conceit: and he made no use of the merit he had, but to make himself enemies." Voltaire adds, "Bussi was released at the end of eighteen months; but he was in disgrace all the rest of his life, in vain protesting a regard for Louis XIV." Bussi ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... exposition of the weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... sunset shadows grew long. He knew the exact spot—the last bit of woodland—from where Martin, across level-lying fields, could obtain his first glimpse of the old farmhouse and porch. His moving-picture conceit next placed M'ri, dressed in white, with touches of blue, on the west porch. He had decided that in the Long Ago Days she had been wont to wear blue, which he imagined to be the Judge's favorite color. Then he caused the unimpressionable ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... ambition to play against a "champion" of the first water, When we appeared on the ground I noticed that the Countess had a small ivory mallet. "This," I said to myself, "is a foregone conclusion; any one who plays with a fancy mallet, and that of ivory, is sure to be beaten." And in my conceit I thought I need not give myself much trouble about the game. Alas! I never appreciated the saying that "pride has a fall" until that day. At first I played with utter indifference, I was so sure of winning, and even when the Countess de Paris walked triumphantly over the ground, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Meanness and conceit are frequently combined in the same character: for he who to obtain transient applause can be indifferent to truth and his own dignity, will be as little scrupulous about them if, by subserviency, he can improve his condition ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in —shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel. My mother had done her utmost to persuade me that I was capable of great achievements; but my father, who thought ambition was the surest road to ruin, and change but ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... to Pistoja, since so you will have it. I am never deceived in my man. I know you and all your concerns as well as if you were my own son—and better, a deal. You have your troubles before you, brought upon you by your own headiness— your own insufferable piety and crass conceit. And I, young sir, and I am one of them. That you ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... all creatures, absence of covetousness, gentleness, modesty, absence of restlessness, vigour, forgiveness, firmness, cleanliness, absence of quarrelsomeness, freedom from vanity,—these become his, O Bharata, who is born to godlike possessions. Hypocrisy, pride, conceit, wrath, rudeness and ignorance, are, O son of Pritha, his who is born to demoniac possessions. God-like possessions are deemed to be for deliverance; the demoniac for bondage. Grieve not, O son of Pandu, for thou art born to god-like possessions. (There ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... rescued from any tinge of conceit or egotism by its absolute simplicity and truth. The imitation referred to is of the moral "Tales" for popular reading of the lower classes, which my cabman had studied. The pity of it is, when so many of the contemporary writers ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... perhaps a little of each," Darrell answered, lightly, not wishing to alarm her or lead her to attach undue importance to the occurrence. "I think Mr. Walcott has an abnormal amount of conceit, and that most of those little mannerisms of his are mainly to attract attention to himself. He was probably trying to produce some sort of an impression on your mind, and to that extent he certainly succeeded, only the impression does not seem to have been as favorable as he perhaps ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... age and the necessary equipment of the young apostles of our race, whose mission will be to strange peoples and curious, though some times sympathetic, souls who are seeking the light and failing to find it. It is a book to be read with humility and a total absence of that mild conceit which refuses to accept any but domestic and partial criticism. The words are those of a thinker and an orator."— Canon ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... of French civilization. We may think that there was something a little too dramatic in the manner of his heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at certain turns of rhetoric in the immortal letter accusing the French nation of intolerable wrong, just as, in our smug Anglo-Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure of the emotional courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the immense misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the event, however indirectly and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the like, that were not in some way concerned with his destiny. And we no doubt own our magnificent modern science of astronomy to the quack system of astrology, which was only a device to induce the heavenly bodies to minister to the importance and conceit of man. ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... mutely appealing to his mother for sympathy. At the end of two, he was drinking and in open rebellion. He had learned to detest his wife. Her wastefulness and cruelty revolted him. The ignorance and the fatuous conceit which lay behind her grimacing mask of slang and ridicule humiliated him so deeply that he became absolutely reckless. Her grace was only an uneasy wriggle, her audacity was the result of insolence and envy, and her wit was restless spite. As ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... The man's self-conceit was unlimited; his sense of humour nil; and in less than a month he had been unanimously voted a "pukka[12] bounder" by that isolated community of Englishmen, who played as hard as they worked, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Instrument, but no more. He has great skill, and has fully mastered it. That is what persevering talent can always do. Bohrer loved his instrument because he could display himself by its aid, not because it was through his genius a minister and revealer of the art to himself and others. His conceit is sublime. It was entire and unique. His posture and air were ridiculously Olympian. Mrs. Sutton is very fat and has a thin voice. There are some good tones in it, but she undertakes the most difficult music. Antignini sings pleasantly but with great effort. ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... transition. Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind. Hence his ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... his conceit that later along he wrote a novel and called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I never told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened to see upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: "The Earl of Durham," and in the same handwriting ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... angelic love is set off by the sensuality and selfishness of her more fortunate rivals. A new note of absolutely tragic dignity seems to be struck in the Sweep and the Noble Lady (vol. iv. 125), showing the piquancy of sentiment which can be evolved from the common and the unclean. The pretty conceit of the Lute (vol. v. 244) is afterwards carried out in the Song (vol. viii. 281), which is a masterpiece of originality[FN294] and (in the Arabic) of exquisite tenderness and poetic melancholy, the wail over the past and the vain longing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... one about all the time, without making an end on't, I wish you could see her with that poor little gal, dressing her up as if she was a rag-baby, scolding her one minute, kissing her the next, calling her here, sending her there, I declare to man, it's enough to put one out of conceit ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... is broadening and becoming something of an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure. Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but where the character withstands this result the increased experience and opportunity is of great value to character. Failure may embitter and thus narrow through envy and lost energy, but also it may strip away conceit and overestimation and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... elaborated and exaggerated versions of these generalisations. These social and political followers of Darwin have fallen into an obvious confusion between race and nationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic conceit. The dissent of the Indian and Colonial governing class to the first crude applications of liberal propositions in India has found a voice of unparalleled penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want of intellectual deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power. The search for a basis ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... author of a book once much admired, De 'l'Art Chretien. In a later work entitled Epilogue a l'Art Chretien, but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of his ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Montreal, mixing his metaphors as topers mix drinks. But I had long since learned not to remonstrate against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—not though all the canons of Laval literati should be outraged. "What, Sir?" he had roared out when I, in full conceit of new knowledge, had audaciously ventured to pull him up, once in my student days. "What, Sir? Don't talk to me of your book-fangled balderdash! Is language for the use of man, or man for the use of language?" and he quoted from Hamlet's soliloquy in a way ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... to him hotly, "I propose taking you home with me. But before I do that, and since you seem to wish it, I am going to lay you on your back here in the road. Frankly, there are some things about you I do not like, and if that will remedy your conceit, I'm going to do it for you—for any ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... so great large and innumerable a sort of stones should be brought thither, and of what matter theyr cement that ioyned and held them together, was made the heygth of the Obelisk and statelinesse of the Pyramides, exceeding the imagined conceit of Dimocrates proposed to Alexander the great, about a worke to be performed vpon the hill Athos. For the strangenes of the Egiptian building might giue place to this. The famous laborinths were far inferior, Lemnos is not to be rehearsed the Theaters ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... and, for the carrying on some particular affairs of State with more secrecy and expedition, must elect, as they have already, out of their own number and others, a Council of State, And, although it may seem strange at first hearing, by reason that men's minds are prepossessed with the conceit of successive Parliaments, I affirm that the GRAND OR GENERAL COUNCIL, being well chosen, should sit perpetual: for so their business is, and they will become thereby skilfullest, best acquainted with the people, and the people with them. The Ship of the Commonwealth is always under ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... putst on; Now, lifted up, thou ravisht shalt behold The truth of things at which we wonder here, And foolishly doe wrangle on beneath; And like a God shalt walk the spacious ayre, And see what even to conceit's deni'd. Great soule oth' world, that through the parts defus'd Of this vast All, guid'st what thou dost informe; You blessed mindes that from the [S]pheares you move, Looke on mens actions not with idle eyes, And Gods ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... and alarming, for they have all means at their disposal, and fix the morality of society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having opinions, just ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... beauties of style or sentiment, of original fancy, or even of successful imitation. In prose, the least offensive of the Byzantine writers are absolved from censure by their naked and unpresuming simplicity: but the orators, most eloquent [112] in their own conceit, are the farthest removed from the models whom they affect to emulate. In every page our taste and reason are wounded by the choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, the discord of images, the childish play of false or unseasonable ornament, and the painful ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... her tone, in the lift of her eyes, in her cryptic smile. But he smothered such unworthy promptings. It was fresh proof of his own unreasonable conceit. He turned away from his wife in silence, but he was sure that his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... and endure throughout all time. Now it has since appeared that this was no more than the truth; and that it might have been conceived and executed by the wise men, had they only been more wise. But they were wise only within the limits of their own conceit. Hence it took the form of an assault on the established enlightenment. The many, with their yearning for a universal happiness, with their deep concern for the greater good, and their jealous compassion ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... by the first full view of the extent of the injuries he had inflicted, the first perception that pride and malevolence had been the true source of his prejudice and misconceptions, and for the first time conscious of the long-fostered conceit that had been his bane from boyhood. All had flashed on him with the discovery of the true purpose of the demand which he thought had justified his persecution. He saw the glory of Guy's character and the part he had acted,—the scales ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you," Stuyvesant resumed grimly. "In the first place, get that love-in-a-cottage idea out of your head. It's a pretty enough conceit for those who are forced to make the best of their personal misfortunes, but that is as far as it goes. Don't for a moment think ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... had a youth of talent in the family,—a sort of sophomorical boil, that the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time Sophomore missed the first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... is plain that I deserve it?" bristled the professor. "Understand, Dixon, that I do not regret my modesty, even though it permits conceited fools like Corveille, who have infinitely less reason than I for conceit, to win awards that mean nothing save prizes for successful bragging. Bah! To grant an award for research along such obvious lines that I neglected to mention them, thinking that even a Morell judge would appreciate their obviousness! Research on the psychon, eh! Who discovered the ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... credit, for that they come from Poets, who are stained with the note of licentious [s]faining, and so put off as vaine fictions; yet seeing they deliuer nothing herein but that which was well knowne and vsuall in those times wherein they liued, they are not slightly, and vpon an imagined conceit, to be reiected: for they affirme no more then is manifest in the records of most approued Histories, whose essence is and must be [t]truth, [u]as straightnesse of a rule, or else deserue not that title. In which wee reade of [x]Martiana, [y]Locusta, ...
— A Treatise of Witchcraft • Alexander Roberts
... iron. The Escribano was demanded in exchange, according to the cartel. The once bustling and self-sufficient man of the law was drawn forth from his dungeon, more dead than alive. All his flippancy and conceit had evaporated; his hair, it is said, had nearly turned gray with fright, and he had a downcast, dogged look, as if he still felt ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... water-baby, and a very wonderful thing it is; and it shows how little I know of the wonders of nature, in spite of forty years' honest labour. I was just telling you that there could be no such creatures; and, behold! here is one come to confound my conceit and show me that Nature can do, and has done, beyond all that man's poor fancy can imagine. So, let us thank the Maker, and Inspirer, and Lord of Nature for all His wonderful and glorious works, and try and find out something about this ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... themselves as ignorant that these were only coasting tradewinds (themselves going away before them in their return homewards till they cross the Line, and so having no experience of the breadth of them) being thus possessed with a conceit that we could not sail from hence till September; this made them still the more remiss in their duties, and very listless to the getting things in a readiness for our departure. However I was the more diligent myself to have the ship scrubbed, and to send my water casks ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... are impressed by character; so that, if you allow your adversary a respectable character, they will think, that though you differ from him, you may be in the wrong. Sir, treating your adversary with respect, is striking soft in a battle. And as to Hume,—a man who has so much conceit as to tell all mankind that they have been bubbled[72] for ages, and he is the wise man who sees better than they,—a man who has so little scrupulosity as to venture to oppose those principles which have been thought necessary to human happiness,—is he to be surprized if another man comes and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... reflected on the spirit displayed by the witnesses for the truth, he might have seen that they were partakers of a higher wisdom than his own; but the tenacity with which they adhered to their principles, only mortified his self-conceit, and roused his indignation. It is remarkable that this philosophic Emperor was the most systematic and heartless of all the persecutors who had ever yet oppressed the Church. When Nero lighted up his gardens with the flames which issued from the bodies of the dying Christians, he wished to ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Richardson has to supply him with a reason so absurd and so diabolical that we cannot believe in it; it reminds us of Hamlet's objecting to killing his uncle whilst at prayers, on the ground that it would be sending him straight to heaven. But we may, if we please, consider Hamlet's conceit as a mere pretext invented to excuse his irresolution to himself; whereas Lovelace speculates so long and so seriously upon the marriage, that we are bound to consider his far-fetched arguments as sincere. And the supposition makes his ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... whom ambition, love of self, and a peculiar conceit of wisdom had bred another persuasion, obstinately abused this kindness of their most noble prince. And when on a certain day there was order issued for the assembly of the great council of the realm, they made secret inquiry to learn the measures which would there be treated of. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... the harangue. Over the culprit's countenance light had dawned, but, shame to tell! it was a light not wholly remorseful. Then silent laughter shook the old man's shoulders, and then—could it be?—there crept about his lips and eyes a smile of superbly masculine conceit. The sisters were fighting over him. Wouldn't Mother be amused when he should tell her what ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... of all kinds; and 'twas the young gentleman that hawked his wares himself. "What d'ye lack?" he kept shouting, and would stop to unfold his merchandise, holding up now a book, and now a silk doublet, and running over their merits like any huckster—but with the merriest conceit ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... Miss Lizzie will have enough of it,' said Mrs. Hazleby; 'it will open her papa's eyes to all her conceit, if anything will.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... birds have been game for the poetic muse, but in most cases the poets have had some moral or pretty conceit to convey, and have not loved the bird first. Mr. Lathrop preaches a little in his pleasant poem, "The Sparrow," but he must some time have looked upon the bird with genuine emotion to have written ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... departments of some Western Powers, of the rank corruption that reigned on the Neva, where every secret had its price; of the insane conceit of Berlin, which had forgotten nothing and learned nothing since the days of Moltke; of the luxurious laziness of Pall Mall, where superannuated soldiers dozed in front of their dusty pigeon-holes after ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... yellow paper would hang out of his trousers pockets as if ready to fall apart at his next movement. And the disrespectful manner in which he crammed my friend Lucien's scarcely dried essay into the breast of his blouse would have certainly called forth remarks from a journalist of more self-conceit. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... contracting her pretty brows, "I can't imagine him any different." And then she laughed. "It's not a bit of use trying to put me out of conceit with him, Court Godmother—so you may as ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... the great terrace, before the centre of the palace, the view is down the principal avenue, which terminates at the distance of two or three miles with a low naked hill, beyond which appears the void of the firmament. This conceit singularly helps the idea of vastness, though in effect it is certainly inferior to the pastoral prettiness and rural thoughts of modern landscape gardening. Probably too much is attempted here; for if the mind cannot conceive of illimitable space, still less can it be represented ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... signification, for which you had in German to scrape together several different expressions. Upon which Gottsched had said, 'We will have that mended (DAS WOLLEN WIR NOCH MACHEN)!' These words the King repeated twice or thrice, with such a tone that you could well see how the man's conceit had struck him;"—and in short, as we know already, what a gigantic entity, consisting of wind mainly, he took this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... did but suggest—but suppose such a case," replied the knight, still smothering his wrath. "And why thinkest thou the conceit so outrageous? Thy King is childless; William is his next of kin, and dear to him as a brother; and if Edward ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the seasons; and the black part takes to itself legs, and runs off occasionally. But, at any rate, there is quite enough to make her a great prize, and an object of admiration and attention to all the little men—not to the old hands, like White and Sumner; they are built up in their own conceit, and wouldn't marry Sam Weller's 'female marchioness,' unless she made love to them first, like one of Knowles's heroines. But the juveniles are crazy about her. Robinson went off more ostentatiously love-sick than a man of his size I ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the great cotton-plant, Sir Robert Peel; and at this moment he has, in his own conceit, seized upon "the white wonder" of Victoria's hand, and is kissing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... whatever about it until I came and began to work in America. I am in the mood for frankness, and I won't spare myself. All my so-called study of modern life in former days was the merest dilettantism, mere conceit and boyish pedantry. I travelled, and the fact that wherever I went I took a small classical library with me was symbolical of my state of mind. I saw everything through old-world spectacles. Even in America I could not get rid of my pedantry, as you will recognise ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... was fishing along, when back came the sucker. Then I began to think a little better of myself; for I had spotted the fellow, and when I saw him walk off, I began to think that for once I had made a mistake in my man, and was losing some of my conceit. He got up very close, and then he asked me how much I would bet him that he could not turn the card with the old woman on it. I looked at him for a moment, as I had lost a little of my confidence when I saw him go away; but soon I remembered that the best fish will ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry at evening renders worthless many things we prized ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... cannot thank you as I should like, nor indeed you either, Mr. Harker. I am deeply grateful to you all for what you have done for me. Truly a man should take heed of his self-conceit, lest he fall, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... and the young man entered, holding the hand of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, whom he led to the table with an air of self-conceit that was nevertheless courteous. The devil had not allowed that hour which had elapsed since the lady's arrival to be wasted. With Francine's assistance, Mademoiselle de Verneuil had armed herself with a travelling-dress more dangerous, perhaps, than any ball-room ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... with the terror of this conceit, everything tended to confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him as it were the visible object of the Almighty's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... I. Clay is a rising power, notwithstanding his conceit. He will make a stir in Congress some of ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... it rather that Conceit rapacious is and strong, And bounty never yields so much but it seems to do her wrong? Or is it, that when human Souls a journey long have had, And are returned into themselves, they ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... and plain declarations of Scripture]. Moreover, since the Scriptures are to be interpreted only by priests, it is not a safe book for the people. We, the priests, will keep it out of their hands. They will get notions from it fatal to our authority; they will become fanatics; they will, in their conceit, defy us." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... a death's-head that from a mural slab Within the chancel leers through sermon-time, Making a mock of poor mortality. The fancy touched him, and he laughed a laugh That from his noonday slumber roused an owl Snug in his oaken hermitage hard by. A very rare conceit—the sexton's son! ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... lovers. He pictured the Judge riding down the dust-white road as the sunset shadows grew long. He knew the exact spot—the last bit of woodland—from where Martin, across level-lying fields, could obtain his first glimpse of the old farmhouse and porch. His moving-picture conceit next placed M'ri, dressed in white, with touches of blue, on the west porch. He had decided that in the Long Ago Days she had been wont to wear blue, which he imagined to be the Judge's favorite color. Then he caused the unimpressionable ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... to suspect that his principal was more selfish and less kindly than he had hitherto supposed. Many an expression of Fink's recurred to his mind, as well as that evening when young Rothsattel, in his boyish conceit, had spoken impertinently to the merchant. "Is it possible," thought he, "that that rude speech should be unforgotten?" And his chief's keen, deep-furrowed face lost inexpressibly by contrast with the fair forms of the noble ladies. "I am not wrong," ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... still more to the silencing of the clowns. They have a great many clowns now, but they are all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. Why, it's as if the literary humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then put asterisks where the humor ought ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... singular geniality of his, that temper of goodness and natural tolerance and affection, which, as Scotsmen best know, is not universal among the Scots. Our race does not need to pray, like the mechanic in the story, that Providence will give us "a good conceit of ourselves." But we must acknowledge that the Scotch temper is critical if not captious, argumentative, inclined to look at the seamy side of men and of their performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than on merits and virtues. An example of these ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... you to write," said the Ink-stand. "It was a hit at you for your conceit. Strange that you cannot see that people make a fool of you! I gave you that hit pretty cleverly. I confess, ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... What if, after all, he had wanted some one in the way she wanted him? What if the some one were herself and he had been afraid to aspire to a woman of her wealth and position? She asked this without any feeling of conceit, for one who loves always dreams he sees signs of favor in the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... them than a peacock has to be vain of his fine tail. And it is better to be lovable than clever, and any one who is conceited never makes the friends that a modest child does. Now promise me that you will try, little daughter, to be gentle and modest, and not come back to us selfish and full of conceit." ...
— Ruby at School • Minnie E. Paull
... Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... be bored to death," he said, "with this man's ignorance and conceit. Don't pay the least attention to him, but there is one thing I want to take the first opportunity of pressing on you. Whatever is done or not done, however limited the funds may be, let us at least have a sanitary floor. You ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... was there for baseness when the lady herself was so desirable; so young, so fair, so lovable. That she was of great estate and 'richly left' made all things possible to any man who had sufficient acquisitiveness, or a good conceit of himself. In a wide circle of country were many true-lovers who would have done ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... attachments; a modern simpleton who swallowed whole one of the old systems of philosophy, and took the indigestion it occasioned for the signs of a divine afflux or the voice of an inward monitor, might see his interest in a form of self-conceit which he called self-rewarding virtue; fanatics who believed in the coming Scourge and Renovation might see their own interest in a future palm-branch and white robe: but no man of clear intellect allowed his course to be determined by such puerile ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Deweys, or Rough Riders as leaders of the people, while the latter serve as a setting, a chorus, howling the praise of the heroes, and also furnishing their blood money for the whims and extravagances of their masters. Such history only tends to produce conceit, national impudence, superciliousness and patriotic stupidity, all of which is in full ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... you know about painting?" Quell roughly interposed; "you are a poet and, pretending to love all creation,—altruism, I think your sentimental philosophers call it,—have the conceit to believe you bear a star in your stomach when it is only a craving for rum. I've been through ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Gretchen, laying a neat little trap for me into which my conceit was soon to tumble me. "Paris is ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad the Sailor" as the end of all literary things. The savagery of boyhood he lacked. He was fond of playing battle, but could not bear to see ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... friend. But if there were room for but few in the boats, who would stay behind and go down with the ship? Nine out of every ten of the men. Why? Not because they are all courageous, I grant you, but because of the horrible conceit that makes them our masters. Pride and conceit constitute what stands for courage in most men. The wild animal has no conceit, he has no pride. Does the male lion rush out to be shot in place of his mate? He do not. He sneaks off in the high reeds ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the limit; one more ohm, or molecule, and they would burst. Actors begin where militia colonels, Fifth avenue rectors and Chautauqua orators leave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthly traitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the danger they run of bursting. In the case of tenors it must sometimes actually ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... so, but pray do not flatter yourself that your mental attitude has the very smallest fragment of an original line, curve or angle. Thus, and not otherwise, do all youthful equestrians feel, excepting those doubly-dyed in conceit, who fancy that they have mastered a whole art in less than twelve hours. You certainly are not a good rider, and yet you have received instruction on almost every point in regard to which you would need to know anything in an ordinary ride on a good road. ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... him. It might be sheer laziness, possibly a result of that mental habit, discernible In his look, whereby he had come to regard his own judgment as the criterion of all matters in heaven and earth. Yet the conceit which relaxed his muscles was in the main amiable; it never repelled as does the conceit of a fop or a weakling or a vulgar person; he could laugh heartily, even with his own affectations for a source of amusement. Of personal vanity he had ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... by fashionable people, which were put into her Vase at Batheaston villa[991], near Bath, in competition for honorary prizes, being mentioned, he held them very cheap: 'Bouts rimes (said he,) is a mere conceit, and an old conceit now, I wonder how people were persuaded to write in that manner for this lady[992].' I named a gentleman of his acquaintance who wrote for the Vase. JOHNSON. 'He was a blockhead ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... don't think I'm hurt." She managed to get herself up on one elbow. "Did you think I wanted you with my dying breath? Why, what conceit! Not you, Handsome Haljan! I ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... Well, maybe it wasn't so unnecessary after all; to be frank, I didn't think so. In my conceit I thought it a good stroke. That's a secret; nobody else knows that! Why shouldn't I have used Mr. Harwood—assuming that I did ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... long pause. The girls had been thrilled with the simple recital, so void of anything like conceit in the part that Denny himself had played in the ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... bronzes from France, were all heaped together pell-mell with the coarse deal boxes and dingy leather cases which served to pack them for traveling. The little man apologized, with a cheerful and simpering conceit, for his litter of curiosities, his dressing-gown, and his delicate health; and, waving his hand toward a chair, placed his attention, with pragmatical politeness, at the visitor's disposal. Magdalen looked at him with a momentary doubt whether Mrs. Lecount had not ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... more wounding to his vanity and self-conceit than the reproaches, well founded though they were, to which he had been obliged to ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington, till I could see them with my eyes shut. And whereas formerly my self-consciousness had bordered on conceit, and I thought myself an uncommon person, parading my schoolbooks through the streets, and swelling with pride when a teacher detained me in conversation, now I grew humble all at once, seeing how insignificant I was ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated other people's cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself, and mean, and bigoted, and conceited, and ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Church Ridge in her 'rickshaw, looked down upon him approvingly. "He's learning to carry himself as if he were a man, instead of a piece of furniture, and"—she screwed up her eyes to see the better through the sunlight—"he is a man when he holds himself like that. Oh blessed Conceit, what should we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... wretches were so far possessed with the false conceit of their own righteousness and holiness, and of the horrid wickedness of all others, that they refused obedience to the civil magistrate, and all laws and ordinances of men. Upon pretence that God commanded them to bear no arms, they not only refused ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... the complex idea of an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely wise and happy being. And though we are told that there are different species of angels; yet we know not how to frame distinct specific ideas of them: not out of any conceit that the existence of more species than one of spirits is impossible; but because having no more simple ideas (nor being able to frame more) applicable to such beings, but only those few taken from ourselves, and from the actions of our own minds in thinking, and being ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Henry VI., who, tradition says, had been himself a prisoner in Ludgate, till released by a rich widow, who saw his handsome face through the grate and married him. St. Martin's church, Ludgate, is one of Wren's churches, and is chiefly remarkable for its stolid conceit in always getting in the way of the west front of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit. The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking Virgil's golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a canaille drawl or sluice of Billingsgate. Modena is burlesqued in her presiding Potta, gibbeted ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... regarded as of the order of topics which have dwindled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated just because they have often been repeated before; a sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up wells. There is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as discarding the greatest number of topics and arguments as obsolete or impertinent. It is to be reckoned on that some of these, on hearing again the old maxims, that a people without divine instruction must ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... them if they remained. The tone of the proclamation was so moderate as to seem pusillanimous. John Randolph called it an apology. Thomas Jefferson did not mean to have war. With that extraordinary confidence in his own powers, which in smaller men would be called smug conceit, he believed that he could secure disavowal and honorable reparation for the wrong committed; but he chose a frail intermediary when he committed this ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... already? I've just been telling the dress-maker that she can go. What you were saying to me has quite put me out of conceit of my new frock; I can quite well get on without one—" said good-natured Mrs. Abel; but her lips trembled a little as ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... moment. I have said that Marten could not have been aware of this foolish weakness of Mary Roscoe, but Marten was not free of blame in the affair, for he had started wrongly as regarded Reuben, and in his self conceit he had placed himself in circumstances where the temptations that surrounded him were more than his nature unaided could resist. Marten would not listen to those who would have taught him that our blessed Saviour verily took not on him ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... quite converted her in the time, and what I'm seeing now, I judge, is the young woman slowly coming back to herself under the influence of this Latin chap. He's cunning, too. He knows how to tickle her vanity, for even she has got a bit of womanly conceit in her, though less vain of her wonderful face no woman could be. But Doria has taken good care to hint his ambition is well lost for love; he's dropped it very cleverly no doubt and already made her see which way he's steering. He's put Jenny ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... such engagements," she replied. She went on with her painting, and several times seemed as if she would have spoken, but did not. Then, without interrupting her work, she said calmly, "Time was, it gratified my conceit and my feelings to have hangers on. Indeed, without them, how should we have had means to come here? But there's a weariness ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... bitterness, he sat down on the leather divan again and permitted his sister to feed him and tell him that his disaster was only an accident. He tried to think so, too, but serious doubts persisted in his mind. There had been a clean-cut finish to that swing and jab which disturbed his boy's conceit. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... all my mistake from the first? If I hadn't been perfectly besotted I should have seen that she was only tolerating me. Don't you see? Why, hang it, Boardman, I must have had a kind of consciousness of it under my thick-skinned conceit, after all, for when I came to the point—when I did come to the point—I hadn't the sand to stick to it like a man, and I tried to get her to help me. Yes, I can see that I did now. I kept fooling about, and fooling about, and it was because I had that sort of prescience—of whatever you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Review, in which Mallet himself sometimes wrote, characterised this pamphlet as 'the crude efforts of envy, petulance and self conceit.' There being thus three epithets, we, the three authours, had a humourous contention how each ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... should undertake the election, and fail of success, I was full as anxious that it should be manifest to the whole world that the peace of the city had not been broken by my rashness, presumption, or fond conceit ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... may be constructed, and this booke of mine, which I have entituled The Faery Queene, being a continued Allegorie, or darke conceit, I have thought good, as well for avoyding of jealous opinions and misconstructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof, (being so, by you commanded) to discover unto you the generall intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I have fashioned, without expressing ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... judicial, contemplative tone, "I think it will do very well on the whole. I am not perfectly sure that the laundress will be satisfied with the arrangement of the laundry, and I don't see exactly, Fred, what you are to do for a dressing-room, when we have more than one visitor. I am out of conceit with the tinting of the drawing-room ceiling, and—and several of the mantelpieces are hideous. But, on the other hand, the dining-room is perfectly lovely, there is no end of closet-room, and the kitchen ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Do you see a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than him. Let another man praise you and not your own mouth; Some other, and not your ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... within my reach. I don't regard myself as an average man, because I can't; it would be practising hypocrisy with myself. There is—if you like—the possibility of self-deception. Perhaps I am misled by egregious conceit. Well, it is honest conceit, and, as it tends to my happiness, I don't pray ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... I am going to do—buckle down to study next fall. And if I show any conceit in the future, well, I want you and Ben Basswood, and Roger and Phil, and all the others, to knock it right out of me," went on the money-lender's son, earnestly. "My eyes are open and I'm going ahead, and I don't ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... A secret voice whispered to him, at the bottom of his heart, that he was but an instrument of vengeance, that he was only caressed till he had given death; but pride, but self-love, but madness silenced this voice and stifled its murmurs. And then our Gascon, with that large quantity of conceit which we know he possessed, compared himself with de Wardes, and asked himself why, after all, he should not be beloved ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wot you calls a fast-coach, but if you've a mind to make a match, I'll bet you a hat, ay, or half a dozen hats, that I'll find a fellow to take the conceit out o' ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... ago," said Mr. Thorpe, fixing his gaze on the lazy fire, "I asked Anne's grandmother to marry me. I suppose I thought that I was unalterably in love with her. I was the very rich son of a very rich man, and—pardon my conceit—what you would call an exceedingly good catch. Well, in those days things were not as they are now. The young lady, a great beauty and amazingly popular, happened to be in love with Roger Blair, a good-looking chap ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... came to a conclusion without any unusual occurrence. Morton could not help feeling sure that he stood well in the opinion of Miss Armytage. He had so little conceit in his composition that it never for a moment occurred to him that he had excited any ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... the state of being noble does actually enforce the famous obligation. Romances are rarely worked out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia's excuse was the prime purity of her moral vision. She was essentially incorruptible, and she took this pernicious conceit to her bosom very much as if it had been a dogma revealed by a white-winged angel. Even after experience had given her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables, when they had a ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... account of an exciting adventure, in which Washington, the white mule, and one Jared Dixon figured. It is evident that the editor of this paper did not have an exalted opinion of the great patriot, as he speaks of him as "a man who has the conceit of believing that there would not be any such country as America if there had not been a George Washington to prevent its annihilation." From this account it appears that Jared Dixon was a Welshman, who lived on a hundred-acre tract of land adjoining the Mount Vernon plantation. Washington ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... Act. Shun Self! 'tis like the worm a rosy bud Folds in its young embraces till it gnaw The heart out. Nature's is no volume writ For his interpreting who measures still Her wisdom by the inverted standard rule Of his own barrenness and blind conceit. There's not a flower but with its own sweet breath Cries out on selfishness, the while it gives Its fragrant treasures to the summer air; And not a bird within the greenwood shade, The burden of whose gentle minstrelsie ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... much that tended to make up for the disgust I felt at the way in which all that was so appropriate and characteristic in so historic a place as Windsor Castle should have been tampered with and rubbed out by the wretched conceit of the worst architects ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... they had been on the lookout for a King, might have gone farther and fared worse,—but the four Georges had somehow got them out of conceit with the word "King," and William, the Sailor, had not quite reconciled them to it;—then they were jealous of foreigners, and last, but not least, there were apprehensions that the larger title would necessitate a larger grant. But the Prince did not need the ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... of trumpets), in all my life. I heard more of the Sacred Book in the cordial voice that had nothing to say about its owner, than in all the would-be celestial pairs of bellows that have ever blown conceit at me. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Latin, but had not cultivated their rational faculty by what is written in those languages. Some of them were seen to be just as simple as those who knew nothing of those languages, and some even stupid, and yet they retained the conceit of being wiser than others. [4] I have talked with some who had believed in the world that man is wise in the measure of the contents of his memory, and who had stored up many things in their memory, speaking almost solely from the memory, and therefore not from themselves but from others, ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... ships, boarded and carried her, and took her out free without the Spanish admiral discovering what we had been about. There's no end to the wonderful things I have seen done, or, I may say, without conceit, have done, Mr Merry. But I rather suspect that we shall have to lose sight of the Dons and Monsieurs for a few days. There's bad weather coming on, and we shall have to stand out to sea; but, never mind, they'll not make their escape with a gale ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... night, man, not a week to tell them. You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit Too bravely of yourselves;—O I know why You love to make man's life a villainous thing, And pose his happiness with heavy words. You mean to puff your craft into a likeness Of what hath been in the great days ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... doth admit, or that they haue not seene, nor had trial of beforetime, they presently condemne. As for example, he that neuer saw the sea will not be persuaded that there is a mediterrane sea; so doe they measure all things by their owne experience and conceit, as though there were nothing good and profitable, but that onely wherewith they mainteine their liues. But we are not growen to that pitch of folly, that because we haue heard of certaine people of Aethiopia, which are fed with locusts, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... supplies throughout the most characteristic element. The fragments cohere by external cement, not by an internal unity of thought; and Pope too often descends to the level of mere satire, or indulges in a quaint conceit or palpable sophistry. Yet it would be very unjust to ignore the high qualities which are to be found in this incongruous whole. The style is often admirable. When Pope is at his best every word tells. His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning into a narrow ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... see you in the Church of Christ." The other, in banter, replied, "Do walls then make Christians?" And this he often said, that he was already a Christian; and Simplicianus as often made the same answer, and the conceit of the "walls" was by the other as often renewed. For he feared to offend his friends, proud daemon-worshippers, from the height of whose Babylonian dignity, as from cedars of Libanus, which the Lord had not yet broken down, he supposed the weight of enmity would ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... my friend," he declared. "You may quote these words in after life as representing the full sublimity of my conceit, but it is true. Have you read my 'Appreciation' ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Benson, "if the trick should succeed, how it would take the conceit out of some people ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... hed as mich conceit on himsen as would lift a balloon, an' he wor so pleeased wi' his sham Rip he wor for tekking him to Mrs. DeSussa before she went away. But Mulvaney an' me stopped thot, knowin' Orth'ris's work, though niver ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... myself," he said, dryly. "But it left me with a little less conceit and a little more sympathy with the hallucinations of ...
— The Spectre In The Cart - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... to tell me anything at all about the matter; elsewise, it is certain that my wish to shield a silly mannikin from reproach, if only for our country's sake, would have made me find out some excuse to mend the bungling of his foolish self-conceit. ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... proper reverence for your age and our common blood, I do not value your favour at a boddle's purchase. I was brought up to have a good conceit of myself; and if you were all the uncle, and all the family, I had in the world ten times over, I wouldn't buy your ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the witty conceit of the author to have the intermezzo played on a handorgan. Up to this point the audience had been hilarious in its enjoyment of the burlesque, but with the first wheezy tones from the grinder the people settled down to silent attention; and when the end came applause for the ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... these woods will be mine, and hang me, if I don't shoot every bird that has roost in them! Then, Miss Helen Armstrong, you'll not feel in such conceit with yourself. It will be different when you haven't a roof over your head". So ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... as to the size of loads which I could lay. The others probably saw that I needed discipline. I must have been dull, or I should have been on my guard for set-backs from Halse, Addison, or the mischievous Doanes. When a boy's head begins to grow large and his self-conceit to sprout, he is ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... is not formed by nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he does not see that they have happened, or because he would show a great spirit, he is firm and remains unharmed. It is a shame then that ignorance and conceit should ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... belief that we can lay down the burden of our wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Marble met him at the gangway with the usual civilities. I was amused with the meeting between these men, who had strictly that analogy to each other which is well described as "diamond cut diamond." Each was dogmatical, positive, and full of nautical conceit, in his own fashion; and each hated the other's country as heartily as man could hate, while both despised Frenchmen. But Sennit knew a mate from a master, at a glance; and, without noticing Marble's sea-bow, a slight for which Marble did not soon forgive him, he walked directly ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... character are the gifts of God. Cicero has truly remarked[223] that men justly thank God for external blessings, but never for virtue, or talent, or character. All that is regarded as their own. And such is the conceit of human self-righteousness in all man-made religions, whether Hindu or Greek, ancient or modern. Philosophy is in its very nature haughty and aristocratic. Even Plato betrays this element. It is ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Find her level! I should like to know the school where you could find another girl like her!" cried the mother, in a tone which showed plainly enough who was responsible for Miss Rhoda's conceit. The tears dried on her face for very indignation, and she sat upright in her seat, staring across ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Meulles. The latter were far from equalling their predecessors. M. de Lefebvre de la Barre was a clever sailor but a deplorable administrator; as for the commissioner, M. de Meulles, his incapacity did not lessen his extreme conceit. ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... as to fall under the censure of this court. I am sorry for the crime which then brought me before you, but I shall ever consider that day as the happiest period of my life—a day in which I was convinced of my folly, obstinacy, and self-conceit; a day to which I owe all the happiness of a calm and peaceful life, free from the passions of thoughtless girls who place enjoyments in the gratification ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... process her hair-dresser remarked casually to her, "We shall be in Paris in a day or two, and in London in another week, and when we have conquered England as well as France you will all have to learn to speak German." This shows the amazing conceit and arrogance of the people. Poor, ignorant things, they are quite hoodwinked by their rulers—and even look forward to seeing their Kaiser "Emperor of Europe"! One day we read that a bag has been made of 30,000 Russians, the next that the number was understated, and ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... the inducement to act and feel as if all this painted scenery were solid rock and mountain. By our own inconsiderateness and sensuousness, we live in a lie, in a false dream of permanence, and so in a sadder sense we walk in 'a vain show,'—deluding ourselves with the conceit of durability, and refusing to see that the apparent is the shadowy, and the one enduring reality God. It is hard to get even the general conviction vivified in men's minds, hardest of all to get any man to reflect upon it as applying to himself. Do ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... at the extravagant conceit, while he took her hand as he spoke, and admired the ring. The white, warm hand remained ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... heard and read of Mr. Dexter, it is a matter of surprise to us how such eccentricities could have attracted the attention they evidently did. It is doubtful if so much folly and conceit could now interest many people for any ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... chance. He announced that a son of the great Booth of tradition, would enact the part of Richmond, and the announcement was enough. Before a crowded place, Booth played so badly that he was hissed. Still holding to his gossamer hopes and high conceit, Wilkes induced John S. Clarke, who was then addressing his sister, to obtain him a position in the company of the Arch ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... other parts of the earth was represented. In this I did acknowledge Him. But all the glory of the city neither abides nor can make its owner any the happier. It cannot be laid hold upon. It is not solid; it is but in conceit. Oh learn me to be crucified to all this and the like, and make me wise unto salvation! Nov. 9—Dined at Billingsgate; saw the prison of King's Bench at Southwark, and the workers of glass, in ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... a year, it was taken to the market-place, where they burned it, believing that the smoke went "to the place where the dead man's soul was." [Footnote: Herrera's Hist. America, ii, 133.] From this or some similar conceit the ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... Friday, as promised in my letter from Princeton, for which I will apologize when we meet. I arrived here in good plight on Friday evening. Augustine came down about noon on Saturday. We have made some satisfactory progress in our business. Seeing the great men of other countries puts me in more conceit of ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... few, I hope—who are sunk below that state; who have lost their sense of right and wrong; who only care to fulfil the lusts of the flesh in pleasure, ease, and vanity. There are those in whom the voice of conscience is lead for a while, silenced by self-conceit; who say in their prosperity, like the foolish Laodiceans, 'I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing,' and know not that in fact and reality, and in the sight of God, they are 'wretched, and miserable, and ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... naturally suppose that he would appreciate these motives, and that he would be glad, when scarce settled on his throne, to secure the powerful friendship of King David. No!—he was young, insolent, inconsiderate, and fond of practical joking,—a vulgar-minded fellow, puffed up with conceit at his elevation to power. Hanun took the servants, the ambassadors of David, and shaved off half their beards, and cut off the lower half of all their clothes, and sent them back to David. And when it was told unto David that ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... to the responsive look of the stranger, and marvelled. Here was no parrot-like repetition of word she had heard oft repeated by his elders; the boy was talking a native tongue, and speaking of things that were real to him. There was no assumption of godliness nor conceit, no holier-than-thou smirk about the child. It was all sincere, as a boy would promise to speak to his own father about a friend's need. It touched Ruth and tears ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... main industry of Sorrento consists in the culture of the orange; and the dark groves, covered with their globes of shining yellow fruit, "like golden lamps in a green light," to quote Andrew Marvell's charming conceit, constitute the chief feature of its environs. Even the coat-of-arms of the medieval city, showing a golden crown encircled by a wreath of the dark glossy leaves, attests the antiquity of this industry here. The cultivation of the orange in Southern Italy is by ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Indian temper beats the conceit out of the Irish. You'll control yours when you're older, for there's nothing you won't do when you put your mind to it, and you'll see the need for not making a fool of yourself too often. But as for its present liking for exercise—it's a long way ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... question may now be asked, is this distinction palpable? Is it a mere conceit of Science, or what human interests attach to it? If it cannot be proved that the resulting moral or spiritual beauty is higher in the one case than in the other, the biological distinction is useless. And if the objection is pressed that ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... to have his equal.[3] But of all the Latin historians, Tacitus had the greatest influence. 'There is no learning so proper for the direction of the life of man as Historie; there is no historie so well worth the reading as Tacitus. Hee hath written the most matter with best conceit in fewest words of any Historiographer ancient or moderne.'[4] This had been said at the beginning of the first English translation of Tacitus, and it was the view generally held when he came to ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... as hardly as the Archbishop himself. Then follows a remark which refers to Mozart's proneness to place undue reliance on promises, instead of using his own judgment. 'You have judgment,' says Leopold, 'but a trifle too much of conceit and self-love, and you are inclined to be over-confiding, and to open your heart ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... his ready apprehension of things, he was able to do more in one hour than others could do in many days by hard study and close application; and yet he was ever humble, and never exalted with self-conceit, the common foible ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... wonder. It is not enough for them to be told they are "fearfully and wonderfully made," but they must attend schools to learn why they live, move, and have their being. Such is man, blinded by his self-conceit; blasted not by the excess, but by the partial light which bursts upon him: whereas woman moves clear in her apprehension, because she believes that "whatever is, is right;" and great in her intelligence, because she ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... unfortunately the case, the question is put less with the genuine desire for knowledge than for the purpose of exhibiting the acumen of the questioner, the form is strongly tinged with the deep orange that indicates conceit. It was at a theosophical meeting that this special shape was encountered, and it accompanied a question which showed considerable thought and penetration. The answer at first given was not thoroughly ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... appreciated by a writer who feels that he has consumed thirty or forty pages of foolscap in vain. I had been over two hours at that work. I had put all the brains I possessed in it. Many of the sentences so pleased me that I had turned back with pardonable conceit to read them over and admire them: but now, like a destroying angel, came the news that shook from beneath my beautiful superstructure its very foundations, and left me nothing but the humiliation of so ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... invite people and to pay for them, and disliked to be invited and paid for. He was never inwardly content on any occasion unless a great deal of money was spent, and he could be sure enough of the large amount only when he himself spent it. He was too simple for conceit or for pride of purse, but always felt any arrangements shabby and sneaking as to which the expense hadn't been referred to him. He never named what he paid for anything. Also Delia had made him understand that if they should go to Saint-Germain as guests of the artist ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... wild boar, for each empty cartridge brought in a human hand, the hand of a man, woman, or child. These hands, drying in the sun, could be seen at the posts along the river. They are no longer in evidence. Neither is the flower-bed of Lieutenant Dom, which was bordered with human skulls. A quaint conceit. ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... ruffle the temper of the philosophic historian, who, without being foolishly vain, had certainly no need of what has been said to be the one form of prayer in which his countrymen, torn as they are by theological differences, agree; "Lord! gie us a gude conceit o' oursels." But when, to all this, these same Southrons added a passionate admiration for Lord Chatham, who was in Hume's eyes a charlatan; and filled up the cup of their abominations by cheering for "Wilkes and Liberty," ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Fame," very adroitly improves on a witty conceit of Butler. It is curious to observe that while Butler had made a remote allusion of a window to a pillory, a conceit is grafted on this conceit, with even more ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... to me, Davie lad, where you got such a conceit of yourself. One would think you were in folks' secrets, and spoke with authority. It will do here at home with Katie and your mother and me, but I am thinking other folk would laugh ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... from their earliest times the use not only of good books, but of good company—those live books, which are such pleasant and sometimes such profitable reading. Society has this good at least: that it lessens our conceit, by teaching us our insignificance, and making us acquainted with our betters. If you are a young person who read this, depend upon it, sir or madam, there is nothing more wholesome for you than to acknowledge ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... against peace on any such conditions. Several other warriors expressed their readiness to contend against Rustem, and they flattered themselves that by a rapid succession of attacks, one after the other, they would easily overpower him. The Khakan was pleased with this conceit and permitted Shinkul to begin the struggle. Accordingly he entered the plain, and summoned Rustem to renew the fight. The champion came and struck him with a spear, which, penetrating his breast, threw him off ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... "And what was your right to make the simple fool break her worthy father's contract, through your love PASSAGES, as your conceit ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... about the surrounding country; and Senorita Isolda frequently found herself contrasting the genial, hearty friendliness and chivalrous courtesy of her brother's English friends with the stiff, haughty, overbearing manner and overweening conceit of the Spanish officers, who seemed to think that such attentions as they chose to pay her ought to be regarded as a vast condescension ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... me, and words to come unbidden, till sometimes I had almost to restrain myself from rising from the pew where I was seated, ascending the pulpit stairs, and requesting the man who had nothing to say, to walk down, and allow me, who had something to say, to take his place. Was this conceit? Considering what I was listening to, it could not have been great conceit at least. But I did restrain myself, for I thought an encounter with the police would be unseemly, and my motives scarcely of weight in the court to which they would ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... Pygmaean matron.—Ver. 90. According to AElian, the name of this queen of the Pigmies was Gerane, while other writers call her Pygas. She was worshipped by her subjects as a Goddess, which raised her to such a degree of conceit, that she despised the worship of the Deities, especially of Juno and Diana, on which in their indignation, they changed her into a crane, the most active enemy of the Pygmies. These people were dwarfs, living either in India, Arabia, or Thrace, and they were said not to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... that I am anxious about him? Let me tell you, my little girl, I shall not drag upon myself the responsibility of increasing the self-conceit of any of ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... into groups and expressed their amazement. Of course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was "just a little off, on the subject of her niece," and agreed that it would be as well not to excite her further. Tillie got a cold reception at rehearsals for ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... of goodness; partly, too, there is a fault in the supply, a foolish desire on the part of the makers to give maturity to their instruments, wherein they always completely fail, yet they will not give up their conceit. Here, again, were we dealing with matters of greater magnitude, the evil influence would be lessened, the artistic impulses would still be felt, though in a less degree; whereas so contracted is ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Betty," cried Anita, interrupting him. "She can swim better than I can, and I thought I was pretty good." There was no conceit in this remark—it was ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... it was so, and from that time Paw and Maw, and Seth and Masters, and even YOU and ME, dear, had nothing else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth's sneaking rages, and Uncle Ben's sneaking fooleries, and Masters's sneaking conceit, but only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and Masters trifle—and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were satisfied, and ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... similar accompaniments. He could not conceive, if he had any accurate knowledge of the human heart, that such an extraordinary attention to dress and the decoration of the person, or such a critical examination of these with a view of procuring admiration, could produce any other fruits than conceit and affectation, or vanity and pride. Nor could he conceive that all these preparations, all this previous talk, all this previous consultation, about the fashions, added to the employment itself of the decoration of the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... since I beheld a portrait of a very, very small literary man. It was easy to discern from it that the small author lives in the belief, that, wherever he goes, he is the object of universal observation. The intense self-consciousness and self-conceit apparent in that portrait were, in the words of Mr. Squeers, "more easier conceived than described." The face was a very commonplace and rather good-looking one: the author, notwithstanding his most strenuous exertions, evidently could make nothing of the features to distinguish him from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... reference at all to their quality. Nor was his Reverence's own voice the first to subside into that gravity which became the solemnity of the occasion; or even whilst he continued the interrogatories, his eye was laughing at the conceit with which it was evident the inner man was not competent to grapple. "Well, Kelly, I can't say but you've answered very well, as far as the repealing of them goes; but do you perfectly understand all the commandments of ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii, of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and most of the other members and decorations are of frequent occurrence in erections of the same aera. A peculiarity is alone observable in the smaller arches of the second row, in which the artist has indulged himself in what may be termed an architectural conceit, lengthening, to a very disproportionate degree, and almost in the moorish fashion, the part above the capital, in order that the whole might range in a line with the larger arch in the centre. The truncated appearance of the wall on either side, leads to the obvious inference, that either this ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... "This fellow must be put into the poor house."—Ib. p. 22. "I have seen the breast works and other defences of earth, that were thrown up."—Ib., p. 24. "Cloven footed animals are enabled to walk more easily on uneven ground."—Ib., p. 25. "Self conceit blasts the prospects of many a youth."—Ib., p. 26. "Not a moment should elapse without bringing some thing to pass."—Ib., p. 36. "A school master decoyed the children of the principal citizens into the Roman camp."—Ib., p. 39. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance. Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... garde,—le meme comme Napoleon,—le petit Caporal." With a hearty laugh we bade "le petit Caporal" bon nuit, and returned to our hotel, asking ourselves what need there could be for the Philosopher's Stone, whilst there existed such a talisman as Conceit? ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... that Allah (magnified be His name!) created of angels[FN126] and men and Jinn, and the love of the Truth was inherent in him, for he knew naught but this; but whenas he saw himself unique in such dignity, there entered into him pride and conceit, vainglory and arrogance which revolted from loyalty and obedience to the commandment of His Creator; wherefore Allah made him inferior to all creatures and cast him out from love, making his abiding- place to be in disobedience. So when he knew that Allah (glorified be His name!) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... that people like you do a great deal of damage to Christianity. You only flatter human conceit. You get hold of some emotional creature and work upon his feelings until in an access of self-absorption he feels that the universe is standing still while the necessary measures are taken to secure his personal salvation. You flatter this poor soul, and then you go away and ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... certainly at least modified my conceit. I was always the dunce of the party—the smallest child knew more of woodcraft than I did, and had something to tell of everything. Seeing Oogahnahbayah, a small eagle-hawk, flying over, they would say, 'He eats the emu eggs.' He flies over where the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... and wonder at it. It has a druidical look, away down in the umbrageous cellar there whose numerous vaulted passages, and far glens of gloom, resemble the dark, damp depths of primeval woods. So strongly did this conceit steal over me, so deeply was I penetrated with wonder at the chimney, that one day—when I was a little out of my mind, I now think—getting a spade from the garden, I set to work, digging round the foundation, especially at the corners thereof, obscurely prompted by dreams of striking upon some ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... calm. Spring, with its budding leaves and flowers, did not produce on me the sinister effect of which the poets speak, who find in the contrasts of life the mockery of death. I looked upon that frivolous idea, if it was serious and not a simple antithesis made in pleasantry, as the conceit of a heart that has known no real experience. The gambler who leaves the table at break of day, his eyes burning and hands empty, may feel that he is at war with nature like the torch at some hideous vigil; but what can the budding leaves say to a child who ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... using his good fortune, SAUNDERS accumulated a pile of most egregious testimonials, and these he regarded as the mainspring of success in life. He had early discovered in himself a singular capacity for drawing salaries, and as he had unbounded conceit and unqualified ignorance, he conceived himself to be fit for any post in life to which a salary is attached. He had also really great gifts as a crampon, or hanger-on, and neglected no opportunity, while he made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... that ever was, if relying less on her Merit, or warned by a recent Experience, she had guarded against some of her own Sex, whom she must think envied her Elevation, and watch'd her Ruin; but as an illusory Conceit that a Passion which had subsisted for many Years, would never be extinguished, brought her into the very Misfortune from which ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... venomous qualitee. (2) It is a vulgar fallacie that the affection of mankind for the Practise is a proof that it is good for them; inasmuch as men are ledd astray by a mode, & furthermore, the affectation & conceit of the patient persuadeth him he is benefited; yet how shall one drug cure of all diseases men of all complexions? (3) Men are by this custom disabled in their goods, spending many pounds a year upon this precious stinke, and are no better than drunkards. (4) It is a great ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to do more than name one or two of the more noted Kabbalists of post-Zoharistic ages. Isaac Lurya (1534-1572) was a saint, so devoid of self-conceit that he published nothing, though he flourished at the very time when the printing-press was throwing copies of the Zohar broadcast. We owe our knowledge of Lurya's Kabbalistic ideas to the prolific writings ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... displayed so much understanding, that they and their disciples were astonished. This is a lesson to youth, who should, gladly and submissively receive instruction, and may with respectful eagerness question their superiors. Let them avoid all offensive forwardness and conceit of their knowledge and attainments; remembering that he who could have taught the wisest of the Jewish doctors, sat at their feet listening and ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... salient points, of our conversation, we had reached the church, where, if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... said Merry, laughing, as much through the excitement produced by this intelligence, as at his conceit, "that Captain Munson would never carry wood aloft, when he can't carry canvas. I remember, one night, Mr. Griffith was a little vexed, and said, around the capstan, he believed the next order would be to rig in the bowsprit, and ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that this statement is not a mere fanciful conceit, I will produce the evidence on which it rests. Very far the most ancient judicial proceeding known to us is the Legis Actio Sacramenti of the Romans, out of which all the later Roman Law of Actions ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... all, but a most serious panegyrist, who never laughs, but does sometimes make his readers laugh, when they see his very unbecoming, mocking grimaces against the "old masters"—not that it can be fairly asserted that it is a laughable book. It has much conceit, and but little merriment; there is nothing really funny after you have got over, (vide page 6,) that he "looks with contempt on Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin." This contempt, however, being too limited for the "graduate of Oxford," in the next page he enlarges ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Mr. Vivian wouldn't think of such a thing. He understands the nature of things, and knows his own position. There is a conceit about the ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... blessed woods and streams, her poor blurred avenues, her crumbling roads, the piteous havoc of the proud estate stood him in splendid stead. Anthony found himself not only talking, but waxing enthusiastic. The queer conceit that Gramarye had responded to his cry for help filled him with exultation. Out of his grateful mouth her ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... sketches—actually "living pictures"—of the fashionable footmen at Bath, beside which the strokes in that diverting piece "High Life below Stairs" seem almost flat. The simperings of these gentry, their airs and conceit, we may be sure, obtain now. Once coming out of a Theatre, at some fashionable performance, through a long lane of tall menials, one fussy aristocrat pushed one of them out of his way. The menial contemptuously pushed him back. The other in a rage said, "How dare you? Don't you know, I'm the Earl ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... Ay, by Jesu, may you, sir, and (in my conceit) our whole nation should sustain the loss by ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... developed; and they diligently devoted themselves to the task of checking these, so that in addition to loving my parents I was soon taught to honour and obey them. Then, when I was five years old, I was sent to school, where, mixing with other boys, any especial conceit of myself that I might have had was quickly nipped in the bud. At school, in addition to a fair, useful education, I was taught to reverence and respect my seniors and superiors, to be obedient, to ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... seeing herself convicted of terrible selfishness and conceit, while her heart was throbbing even painfully with humility and gratitude. "You have done me a great honour, and if you would not be disappointed—if you would bear with me—if you are not deceiving yourself in your nobleness—I ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... ever met, Oo-koo-hoo and George Bernard Shaw would have become fast friends; for George, too, insists on the very same thing. But does not the average man, from his great store of conceit, draw the flattering inference that it is he and he alone who does the courting, and that his success is entirely due to his wonderful display of physical and mental charm; while the average woman looks in her mirror and laughs in her ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... lose, anyway. He'll take the conceit out of these Army hikers," predicted some of the knowing ones ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... doctor had one annoying habit—imagined he had the right to poke fun at everybody simply because he was a doctor. "The man's riddled with conceit, like all these professionals," ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... is allied conceit and ostentation, shows itself in proportion to the size of the writing, the taller and more flourished the upstrokes and the longer the downstrokes, the greater the self-assertiveness. The flourish beneath ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... chandelier, or, as the Jew remembered in the version of the Evangels, like the gifts those bearded wise men, of whom he might resemble one, brought to the manger of the infant Christ—gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Struck by the conceit, he looked again at the baby's face—the baby but a few days or weeks old—and he felt, in spite of himself, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... enhavi. Compromise kompromiti. Compromise kompromiso. Compulsion devigo. Compunction memriprocxo. Computation kalkulo. Compute kalkuli. Comrade kamarado. Concave kaveta. Conceal kasxi. Consecutive intersekva. Concede cedi. Conceit malmodesteco. Conceited malmodesta. Conceive gravedigxi. Concentrate koncentrigi. Concentric koncentra. Conception (idea) elpenso. Concern koncerni. Concern (anxiety) zorgemo, malkvieto. Concerning ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the doorway of the next room, was Carson himself. The great painter had undressed him and revealed him. What a comment to hang in one's own home! The abiding impression of the portrait was self-assurance; hasty criticism would have called it conceit. All the deeper qualities of humanity were rubbed out for the sake of this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... understand," rejoined the other, with adorable conceit. "You aren't used to it yet, but one soon gets into it, you know! See how perfectly at my ease I ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... his own tenants, and with his little gift to your uncle's. Mrs. Fortescue allows him to be the best of landlords: I might have told you that, had I thought it necessary to put you into some little conceit of him. He has qualities, in short, that may make him a tolerable creature on the other side of fifty: but God help the poor woman to whose lot he shall fall till then! women, I should say, perhaps; since he may break half-a-dozen hearts before that time.—But to the point I was ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... soiled pink fleshings and any time the dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the pipes a male comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a woman. But to kick her is regarded as much the more whimsical conceit. This invariably sets the audience rocking with uncontrollable merriment. Howsomever, I am not writing a critique of the merits of the performance. If I were I shou1d say that to begin with the title of the piece was wrong. It should have been ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Colossal conceit! What amazing ignorance or oversight of natural laws! These Llott scientists could see no farther than their snub noses, or at least no farther than the satellite system of Jupiter. And Ianito was complimenting the astronomer on ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... own and his friends' experiences. But mentally the boy is Tolstoi himself, revealed in all the awkwardness, self-consciousness, and morbidity of youth. The boy's pride, vanity, and curious mixture of timidity and conceit do not form a very attractive picture, and were not intended to. Tolstoi himself as a young man had little charm, and his numerous portraits all plainly indicate the fact. His Satanic pride made frank friendship with him almost an impossibility. Despite our immense ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... though she determined to have it out with him sometime during this holiday they had planned. But somehow, as he stepped carelessly along, a dashing manliness in every motion, a breath of the great plains coming with his sunburnt face and belted waist, he and his self-conceit jarred to her against this sordid court and these children's desolate lives. How dared he talk as he did about only wanting what was fair, she thought! How had he the heart to care only for himself and his mates while in these city ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... to consider. For me, would it not be the better part to show her that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be my first consideration? Certainly there is nothing in a man I despise more than conceit in affairs of this sort. When I hear one of my sex boasting of his 'conquests,' I turn from him in disgust. 'Conquest' implies effort; and to lay one's self out for victories over the other sex always reminds me of pigeon-shooting. On the other hand, we must make allowances for our position of advantage. ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... have a rather poetical conceit in accounting for the movements of the celestial bodies. Their theory is that the sun rules the heavens. He is a big chief; the moon is his squaw, and the stars are his children. The sun devours his children whenever he is able to catch them. They are constantly ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... dwelt upon this last hope; he considered his first interpretation of the conduct of the widow as much more probable. Finally, by a natural reaction, of mind over matter, the triumphant boasting of the chevalier ceased at the same time with his conceit. His face was no longer distorted by grotesque vanity; for it expressed the better qualities of the chevalier—resolution, courage—we would add loyalty, for it was impossible to add more frankness to his conceit than was to ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... takes to itself legs, and runs off occasionally. But, at any rate, there is quite enough to make her a great prize, and an object of admiration and attention to all the little men—not to the old hands, like White and Sumner; they are built up in their own conceit, and wouldn't marry Sam Weller's 'female marchioness,' unless she made love to them first, like one of Knowles's heroines. But the juveniles are crazy about her. Robinson went off more ostentatiously ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the old-style S [s] has been retained. Much of the flavour of Acetaria is lost if it is scanned too hurriedly; and one should remember also that Latin and Greek were the gauge of a man of letters, and if the titles and quotations seem a bit ponderous, they are as amusing a conceit as the French and German complacencies of ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... Burton says of the Arabs, "Above all their qualities, personal conceit is remarkable; they show it in their strut, in their looks, and almost in every word. 'I am such a one, the son of such a one,' is a common expletive, especially in times of danger; and this spirit is not wholly to be condemned, as it certainly ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... lay. The others probably saw that I needed discipline. I must have been dull, or I should have been on my guard for set-backs from Halse, Addison, or the mischievous Doanes. When a boy's head begins to grow large and his self-conceit to sprout, he is sometimes ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... from my bed, Mrs. Lorraine, merely to lecture my conceit by proving that there are in this world wiser heads than that of Vivian Grey, on my honour you are giving yourself a great deal of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... imitation of a Greek epigram, Politian, being on such friendly terms, would enclose a Greek epigram of his own, on the same interesting insect—not, we may presume, out of any wish to humble Scala, but rather to instruct him; said epigram containing a lively conceit about Venus, Cupid, and the culex, of a kind much tasted at that period, founded partly on the zoological fact that the gnat, like Venus, was born from the waters. Scala, in reply, begged to say that his verses were ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... stoical grandeur that commands respect. Indeed, in all that Margaret spoke, wrote, or did, no cynic could detect the taint of meanness. Her elation came not from opium fumes of vanity, inhaled in close chambers of conceit, but from the stimulus of sunshine, fresh breezes, and swift movement upon the winged steed of poesy. Her existence was bright with romantic interest to herself. There was an amplitude and elevation in her aim, which were ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... urge any arguments against the self-conceit of Amaranthe: that her beauty could be in any degree diminished was a supposition that she would not admit into her thoughts. She added more ornaments to the profusion that already glittered on her person, ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... in Manu's book of law. Outside of this highest Being, there is nothing real. The world of sense, or nature, (Maya, the female side of Brahma), is mere seeming and illusion of the senses. The human spirit is a part of Brahma, but perverted, misled by this same illusion to the conceit that he is individual. This illusion is done away with by a deeper insight, by means of which the dualism vanishes from the wise man's view, and the conceit gives place to the true knowledge that Brahma alone really ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... I am lost in conceit, but there is another girl here who I begin to think looks with a certain kindness on me. Her name is Elsie V., and she is the only daughter and heiress of an old family in this place. She is a portentous and almost fearful creature. If I should tell you ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... secret trials, chastenings, which none but they and God can understand, the Lord is cleansing them from their secret faults, and making them to understand wisdom secretly; burning out of them the chaff of self-will, and self- conceit, and vanity, and leaving only the pure gold of righteousness. How many sweet and holy souls, who look cheerful enough before the eyes of man, yet have their secret sorrows. They carry their cross unseen all day long, and lie down to sleep on it ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... road to the point where by making a slight detour among some pines he could cross farther down, a striking but wholly incongruous figure emerged from the trees. With shining top hat, fur-lined coat, gauntlets and cane, M. Lalonde, the Montreal detective, came forward with his professional conceit no whit impaired by juxtaposition with these glacial and solitary surroundings. He handed his card to the priest and bowed ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... other. "There's a man out east bin awfully cut up in a mowin'-machine," said he, glancing up at Miss Custer sideways from under his broad-brimmed straw hat, sure that she would appreciate the news, he being the first to tell it; for he had a boyish conceit that Miss Custer had a very high opinion of him, and even indulged the fancy that if he were a man—say twenty-one—instead of a youth of seventeen, he could cut out all them downtown fellers that hung ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... room" had a hand-woven carpet on the floor, made of a material called "drugget." A few old prints, in glaring colors, were on the walls. There was a Sacred Heart and an odd-looking picture of the dead Christ resting in a tomb, with an altar above and candles all around it. It was a strange religious conceit. On another wall was a coffin plate, surrounded with waxed flowers and framed, with a little photograph of a young man in the center of the flowers. The chairs were plain enough, but covered with a coarse hand-made lace. It was not Mac's kind of a room, at all. It made me shudder and wonder how ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... Clodd's conceit shot upward to a point that in the case of anyone less physically robust might ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... nothing is contemptible. To him, even the follies of his fellow-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of the material from which scholars and politicians no less than drunkards and inconstants are gradually in course of time developed. Somebody described "conceit" to me the other day as egotism in which contempt for others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism was normal, since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of personal utility to the world, and no objection was urged against it. Vanity was to be tolerated, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the commonest surroundings, enduring the straits of poverty, lack of education, no accomplishments, how could she take her place in the front rank of Mount Morris society? And the boys—how would they accept this rusticity and probably self conceit? ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... this, that I had actually set out to find the first lieutenant when reflection and common sense came to my aid and asked me what was this thing that I was about to do. The answer to this question was, that with the self-sufficiency and stupendous conceit which my father had especially cautioned me to guard against, I was arrogating to myself the possession of superhuman sagacity, and (upon the flimsy foundation of a wild and extravagant fancy, backed by a mere chance resemblance, which after all might prove to be no resemblance at all if Richards ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... accidents of life have contributed to the result. Why should you not be loved for yourself? You have an interesting appearance. I think you very pretty. You have choice accomplishments and agreeable conversation and the sweetest temper in the world. You want a little self-conceit, my dear. If I were you and admired, I should never think ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... and greatly disappointed; for it was an utter negation and defeat of the policy which they had prescribed. The General, like a good soldier, quietly and submissively acquiesced; but Mr. Seward, a man of expedients and some conceit, was unwilling and unprepared to surrender the first place in the Administration, and virtually publish the fact by an Executive mandate which upset his promised and preferred arrangements. It was then that he became aware of two things: first, that neither himself ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... true; but he also doubts whether it be false; and, either from his impatience of the theories which infidelity proposes in its place, as inspiring yet stronger doubts, or in revenge for the peace of which he has been robbed, he never seems more at home than in ridiculing the confidence and conceit of that internal oracle, which professes to solve the problems which, it seems, Christianity leaves in darkness; and in pushing the principles on which infidelity rejects the New Testament to their ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... took the greatest pains in his instruction. Before the end of her Freshman year she twice succeeded in getting through his guard and landing a thrust on his well-rounded figure; and though to keep down her conceit he told her that he must be losing, along with his slenderness, some of his youthful agility, he confessed to his wife that teaching Miss Marshall was the best fun he had had in years. The girl was as quick as a cat, and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... puzzled myself with the mysteries of the Ten Attributes, and the mystic symbolism of God's Beard, whereof every hair is a separate channel of Divine grace; and once I came to comical humiliation from my conceit that I had succeeded by force of incantations in becoming invisible. As this was in connection with my wife, who calmly continued looking at me and talking to me long after I thought I had disappeared, I am reminded to say something of this companion of my boyish years. For, alas! ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... now and here,—and these people assemble every week to converse upon them. What more rational thing could they do? If they came together to snivel and cant, and to support one another in a miserable conceit of being the elect of the human species, we might object. But no description can show how far from that, how opposite to that, is the tone, the spirit, the object, of the Friday-evening ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... give himself away; he intended, indeed, precisely the contrary; but, after every round of conversation Miss Boyson felt herself more and more richly provided with materials for satire at the expense of England and the English tourist, his invincible conceit, insularity, and condescension. She was a clever though tiresome woman; and expressed herself best in letters. She promised herself to write a "character" of General Hobson in her next letter to an intimate friend, which should be a masterpiece. Then, having ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you," said Warner, with a smile. "Natural you should think him good-looking. But don't it show a little self-conceit, Louisa?" ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... from his heart's core; — Her, who of all bad women is the worst, He still had censured, in his wiser lore, If by his brother Aquilant accurst, Her Gryphon, in his partial love, excuses, For mostly self-conceit ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... my last quarter was cut short in the middle; which untoward event arose from no arrogance or supercilious conceit on my part, as though I had perfected myself in the mysteries of pigeon-wing and balancez, but from the abrupt departure of the professor himself, who, true to the name indicative of his constitutional levity, found it convenient to disappear betwixt two days, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... I wish you not to be ignorant, brothers, of this mystery; that you may not be wise in your own conceit. For hardness in part has come upon Israel, till the fullness of the gentiles shall come in, [11:26]and so all Israel shall be saved; as it is written, A deliverer shall come from Zion, he shall turn away impiety from Jacob. [11:27]And this is the promise to them from ...
— The New Testament • Various
... authority—and will obtrude his literary eloquence into our solemn courts of law, he deserves—what does he not deserve?—to be addressed henceforth by a name suggestive at once of ignorance, presumption, and conceit, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... is no conceit," I persisted. "Is it conceit to say my hair is black? It is black, and everybody can see it is. I have nothing to do with it. Nature made it black, and black it is, and I know it. Should I gain anything by contending that it was red? I don't see that I should. However," ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... individuals of the province, the enjoyment of gainful, or an immunity from onerous offices; they may operate upon the people to whom they relate; but no province can confer provincial privileges on itself. They may have a right to all which the king has given them; but it is a conceit of the other hemisphere, that men have a right to all which they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... organizations. At least to this wonderful prescience of future sugar-value did Mr. Linden himself attribute his rise in the world, and gradual increase in rotundity, riches, and respectability. This constant success engendered, as it is too apt to do, inordinate egotism, conceit, self-esteem, vanity. There was scarcely a social, governmental, or economical problem which he did not believe himself capable of solving as easily as he could eat his dinner when hungry. "Common-sense business-habits"—his favorite phrase—he believed to be quite sufficient ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... generously but intelligently." He talked rapidly on, with his manner as full of unexpressed and inexpressible intensity as the voice of the violin, with his frank egotism that had no suggestion of vanity or conceit. "Because I systematize my time, I'm never in a hurry, never at a loss for time to give to whatever I wish. I didn't refuse to keep you waiting for your sake but for my own. Now the next hour belongs to you and me—and we'll forget about time—as, if we were dining in a restaurant, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... So wickedness means, not merely open crimes which are punishable by the law, but all which comes out of a man's own wilfulness and perverseness— injustice (which is the first meaning of iniquity), cunning, falsehood, covetousness, pride, self-conceit, tyranny, cruelty—these seem to be what the Scripture calls wickedness. Of course one cannot draw the line exactly, in any matters so puzzling as questions about our own souls must always be: but on the whole. I think you will find this ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality, than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out of us—to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of moral advance—and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the goal. This sudden awakening to the ...
— Progress and History • Various
... from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reaches, have from that time not only ceased to advance and improve in their performance, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... dog, ordering the growling, discontented ones to be quiet, and comforting the patiently waiting ones with a light jest concerning the next piece. Suddenly he raised his eyes, and his quick glance rested on Gotzkowsky's smiling, placid face. "Ah, you laugh," said he, "and in your human conceit you find it quite beneath one's dignity to occupy one's self with dogs, when there are so many human beings. Let me tell you, you don't understand any thing about it! You don't know dogs at all, and ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process, not at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason; and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it—enforcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him—when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... sentiment of the postures of naked children playing or sleeping. It did me good even to watch the violinists drawing their bows so masterly—every motion a study. I allow'd myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily asserting their ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... thank you as I should like, nor indeed you either, Mr. Harker. I am deeply grateful to you all for what you have done for me. Truly a man should take heed of his self-conceit, lest he fall, as I ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... for my conceit in imagining that I could play with such a dangerous man as Meeker proved himself to be, especially since I had seen through his disguise almost from the first. One of two things in Manila would have saved me ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... to him, that actually sinneth, or omitteth his Duty. Enthusiasm indeed, which, in its highest Stages, is a kind of spiritual Madness, may have on some Minds a quite different Effect; and the Poor Soul, that is subject to this gloomy and tyrannical Principle, may conceit strange things; it may at one Time imagine itself under the Guilt of Adam's Sin, which it never committed; and fancy itself a Saint in Jesus Christ (and what not) at another: it is a mad Principle, fruitful of false Doctrines, Chimeras, and Monsters. It matters not whether (as in the Case ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... be lacking, however, the glow of tender feeling in self-love. The projection of the self-interest to others has a passion, a melting in it that self-love never seems to possess, though it may be constant and ever-operating. Self-regard, self-admiration or conceit may be very high and deeply felt, but though more common than real admiration for others, it seldom reaches the awe and reverence that ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... call them—I mean the class now being spoiled by petting in England—let them be told (perhaps it may be said plainest by their best friends) that there are just as many proud exclusives among them as in any other stratum of society, and that they have at least a full share too of conceit, foppery, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... always to get their own way. They are very adroit and not too scrupulous about the means they use to attain their ends. They have that absolute belief in themselves which their friends call self-confidence and their enemies conceit. ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... could plunge a dagger into my bosom, when I hear myself everywhere pitied, and observe the triumph of my enemies, who say that this is always the case with vain persons, whose heads are turned with conceit, who affect to despise forms and such petty, ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... the institution of our club, Sir Joshua Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. 'I like it much, (said he), I think I shall be of you.' When Sir Joshua mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased with the actor's conceit. 'HE'LL BE OF US, (said Johnson) how does he know we will PERMIT him? The first Duke in England has no right to hold such language.' However, when Garrick was regularly proposed some time afterwards, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... a coal passer came up the stairs, and he was swearing at the delay in being relieved. Something told Mr. Reardon this fellow would make trouble, so without warning he hit the coal passer a light rap "to take the conceit out av him." Two minutes later the coal passer had joined his fellows ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... discipline too. Laziness, worldliness, the absorption of attention with other things, self-conceit, prejudice, and, I was going to say, almost above all, the taking of our religion and religious opinions at secondhand from men and teachers and books —all these stand in the way of our hearing the Spirit of God when ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Pantheisticon (1720). The outcry raised by the orthodox party against the "poor gentleman" who had "to beg for half- crowns," and "ran into debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging," together with his own vanity and conceit, changed him from being a somewhat free- thinking Christian into an infidel and atheist or Pantheist. He died in extreme poverty at Putney ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... is, without any special training, by mere gift of birthright, competent to any task that may be set him, is commonly said to have come in with Andrew Jackson; and President Eliot, of Harvard, has dubbed it a "vulgar conceit."[68:1] It is undoubtedly a dangerous doctrine to become established as a tenet of national belief and least of all men can the head of a great institution for the training of the nation's youth afford to encourage it. None the less, when the American character is ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... all they could to foment this spirit of discontent among those who were ordinarily well disposed. They assumed the responsibility of declaring that the trip into Germany had been indefinitely postponed. Probably, with the self-conceit incident to human nature, they really believed they were no worse than the best of the crew, and they desired to involve all their shipmates in the odium of the insubordination which ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... was new. Everything was to be done—to be made; and who was so capable for both, in their own conceit, as that swarm of worn-out lobbymen and contractors who, having thoroughly exploited "the old concern," now gathered to gorge upon the new. And by the hundred flocked hither those unclean birds, blinking bleared eyes at any chance bit, whetting foul bills to peck at carrion ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... are a number of fine speeches in this book: "Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;" there's a conceit: Fountains fraught with tears. "Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;" is't not excellent? "Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs;" O God's me: "confused and filled with murder and misdeeds." Is't not simply the best that ever you heard? Ha, how ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... hinder him, sending her airy spies Forth with delusion to entrap his eyes, As would have fired a hermit's chill desires Into a flame; his greedy eye admires The more than human beauty of her face, And much ado he had to shun the grace; Conceit had shaped her out so like his love, That he was once about in vain to prove Whether 'twas his Clarinda, yea or no, But he bethought him of his herb, and so The shadow vanished; many a weary step It led the prince, that pace with it still kept, Until it brought him by a hellish ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... it not been for the tutors who came to give me lessons, as well as for St. Jerome (who at intervals, and very grudgingly, applied a spur to my self-conceit) and, most of all, for the desire to figure as "clever" in the eyes of my friend Nechludoff (who looked upon distinctions in University examinations as a matter of first-rate importance)—had it not been for all ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... and fine conceit,—the good man's play Of quiet fancies, meet to while away The slow hours ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of Russia, is well able to estimate at its true worth the insatiable greed of Germany and the ever-encroaching character of her ruler. Because of his own self-control and disinterestedness, the Tzar must have been able to gather from William's words and works a very fair idea of his unbounded self-conceit; of that vanity which, like its emblem the eagle of the outspread wings, aspires to cover ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... seems as if there was some mystery in it. I will, however, talk to your father about it, and we will hear what he shall say. In the meantime, raise your spirits, and don't be so easily alarmed. You are naturally nervous and timid, and this is merely a poor, cowardly conceit that has got into your head; but your own good sense will soon show you the folly of yielding to a mere fancy. Amuse yourself on the spinet, and play some brisk music that will cheer your spirits; it ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... I noticed that the little paths were paved with what looked like circular tiles, but which, on inspection, I found to be old-fashioned stone ink-bottles, buried bottom upwards; and I was meditating upon the quaint conceit of the forgotten scrivener who had thus adorned his habitation—a law-writer perhaps, or an author, or perchance even a poet—when I perceived the number that I was seeking inscribed on a shabby door in a high wall. There was no bell or knocker, so, lifting the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... the essential nature of the individual soul, and that it is mere delusion on the Self's part to ascribe to itself agency. 'By the attributes (guna) of Prakriti, actions are wrought all round.' He who is deluded by self- conceit thinks 'I am the agent'; 'when the seer beholds no other agent than the gunas'; 'Prakriti is said to be the cause of all agency of causes and effects, whilst the soul is the cause of all enjoyment of pleasure ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species.' ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... to the clean, unvarnished truth in dogged fashion, and had so impressed all by his simple story, in which he seemed only trying to tell facts, no matter how they bore upon himself, that even the prosecutor was out of conceit with his side ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the other; simplicity may be improved, but pride and conceit never. Well, I don't discourage you; I think it will please Sir Everard, from what he said when I jested with him about it; only I hope that intolerable papa, with his brogue, and his snuff, and his Latin, and his insufferable long stories about the Duke of Berwick, will find ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Halliday is just working you, Johnny, for an easy mark. You think it's pride that's holding you back from taking dad's offer and staying here and settling down. But it isn't that at all, Johnny. It's just plain conceit and swell-headedness, and I hate to tell you this, but ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Croisette—a superb animal—a "patch" on Sarah, who was at this time as thin as a harrow. Even then I recognized that Sarah was not a bit conventional, and would not stay long at the Comedie. Yet she did not put me out of conceit with the old school. I saw "Les Precieuses Ridicules" finely done, and I said to myself then, as I have often said since: "Old school—new school? What does it matter which, so long as ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... entertained with the Glastonbury Thorn. When we have wondered at that a little, "Father," saith the son, "let us have the Spirit in the Wood." After that, "Now tell us how you served the robber." "Alack!" saith Sir Harry, with a smile, "I have almost forgotten that; but it is a pleasant conceit, to be sure;" and accordingly he tells that and twenty more in the same order over and over ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... may bring food out of the earth, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make him a cheerful countenance, and bread to strengthen man's heart. Whilst the unbeliever, blinded by his self-conceit, is worshipping his own little stock of knowledge, and neglecting God, let us be singing our Te Deum—"We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... personage who called himself a chevalier, and who professed extraordinary skill in the diseases of the eye, dining one day with the bar on the Oxford circuit, related many wonders which he had done. Bearcroft, a little out of humour at his self-conceit, said—"Pray, Chevalier, as you have told us a great many things which you have done, try to tell us something which you cannot do." "Nothing so easy," said Taylor; "I cannot pay my share of the dinner-bill; and that, sir, I must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... education, or, as she phrased it, the "fetchin' up" of children, which she held should be performed to the letter of the old stiff rule. In this manner she had already trained up six sons, who were all following their fortunes upon the seas, and, on this account, she had no small conceit of her abilities; and when she thought she discerned a lamb being left to frisk heedlessly out of bounds, her zeal was stirred to bring ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... distinction. But his lot was thrown upon stormy times, and a most difficult crisis amongst tribes, whose native ferocity was exasperated by debasing forms of superstition, and by a nationality as well as an inflated conceit of their own merit absolutely unparalleled, whilst the circumstances of their hard and trying position under the jealous surveillance of an irresistible lord paramount, in the person of the Russian Czar, gave a fiercer edge to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... entered, speaking softly to the officer for fear of being heard in the princess's chamber. 'To convince you,' said he, 'that there is neither presumption, nor whim, nor youthful conceit in my undertaking, I leave it to your own desire whether I should cure the princess in your presence, or where we are, ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... the Baron. "If monkeys, why not donkeys? Certainly they do. All creatures have some means of communicating their thoughts to each other. Why man in his conceit should think otherwise I don't know, unless it be that the birds and beasts in their conceit probably think that they alone of all the creatures in the world ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... simple, but he was not a fool. He was modest and diffident, but, as is generally the case with modest and diffident persons, there existed, somewhere within the recesses of his consciousness, a very good conceit of himself. He had already learnt, the trout, to look up through the water from his hole and compare the skill of the various anglers on the bank who were fishing for the rise. And he decided that morning, finally: 'Snyder shall catch me.' His previous decision to the same effect, made under the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... ashore, youngster. They are living, as it might be, in the midst of the sea, without knowing it; by sufferance, as it were, the water being so much the more powerful and the largest. But there is no end to conceit in this world: for a fellow who never saw salt water often fancies he knows more than one who has gone round the Horn. No, no, this earth is pretty much an island; and all that can be truly said not ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... window which opened into a bewildering vista of summer beauty. There were flowers beside each plate as well as in the quaintly carved bowl in the centre of the table. Evadne caught herself smiling. That had always been a conceit of ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... but despise the man in my heart who laid such a stress upon morals, leaving grace out of the question; and viewed it as a deplorable instance of human depravity and self-conceit; but, for all that, I was obliged to accept of his terms, for I had an inward thirst and longing to distinguish myself in the great cause of religion, and I thought, if once I could print my own works, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... of conceit with the noble red man. Rectus took his proclamation out of his pocket as we walked along the sea-wall, and, tearing it into little pieces, threw it into the water. When we reached the steam-ship wharf, we ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... them—agonized curiosity. Ulysses wants to know the facts of the matter; and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was not a fact. The delay in the first three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power could possibly have written ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... what abiding there is. We may long enough get upon stilts, for be we upon them, yet must we go with our legs. And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail. The best and most commendable lives, and best pleasing me are (in my conceit), those which with order are fitted, and with decorum are ranged, to the common mould and human model; but without wonder or extravagancy. Now hath old age need to be handled more tenderly. Let us recommend it unto that God who is the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was not clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency of his end; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind: and some there were who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep for ever upon his grave, as in contempt of the transient and shallow tears of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... the various love-affairs in which she had had a part as the usual incidents in every woman's career. They had touched her little. She was extraordinarily lacking in conceit, and she could not realize, since her sympathy was unquickened by a responsive affection, that a love of short growth could mean much to its possessor. This lack of appreciation of love's intensity was increased by the ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... uphill work before him. His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... impertinences in the Greek himself, such as his so-called honeysuckle ornaments and others, in which there is a starched and dull suggestion of vegetable form, and yet no real resemblance nor life, for the conditions of them result from his own conceit of himself, and ignorance of the physical sciences, and want of relish for common nature, and vain fancy that he could improve everything he touched, and that he honored it by taking it into his service: by freedom from ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... became confused with the pestle, so, "the Soma-plant, whose stalks are crushed by the priests to make the Soma-libation, becomes in the Vedas itself the Crusher or Smiter, by a very characteristic and frequent Oriental conceit in accordance with which the agent and the person or thing acted ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the fashion of late years to deny the existence of this abomination; the doubters, wise in their own conceit, insisting that the crime is too great for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... here are a number of fine speeches in this book: "Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;" there's a conceit: Fountains fraught with tears. "Oh life, no life, but lively form of death;" is't not excellent? "Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs;" O God's me: "confused and filled with murder and misdeeds." Is't not simply the best that ever ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... field or street: The clang of kettle,—rasp of damper-ring And bang of cookstove-door—and everything That jingles in a busy kitchen lifts Its individual wrangling voice and drifts In sweetest tinny, coppery, pewtery tone Of music hungry ear has ever known In wildest famished yearning and conceit Of youth, to just cut loose and eat and eat!— The zest of hunger still incited on To childish desperation by long-drawn Breaths of hot, steaming, wholesome things that stew And blubber, and up-tilt the pot-lids, too, Filling the sense with ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... an elephant, or something big like that, to work in the water with me, I'll have to thrill the crowds by making them wonder how I can live so long without breathing," decided Joe. "I'll do four minutes or—bust!" and he smiled at his conceit. ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... going to my house in the country, I shall want my papers, which I beg you therefore to return. You are slothful, and you help me nothing, so that I am half in conceit you affect not the argument; for myself I know well you love and affect. I can say no more, but non canimus surdis, respondent omnia sylvae. If you be not of the lodgings chalked up, whereof I speak in my preface, I am ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... beware. The penknife and the axe should respect each other; for they were wrought from the same steel: but the penknife will not be wise in trying to fell trees. Let them accept their own position, not in conceit and arrogance, but in fear and trembling; and see if they cannot play the man therein, and save their own class; and with it, much which it has needed many centuries to accumulate and to organise, and ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... had never been other than hopeful. To the human being hope is as natural as hunger; yet how few there are that hope as they hunger! Men are so proud of being small, that one wonders to what pitch their conceit will have arrived by the time they are nothing at all. They are proud that they love but a little, believe less, and hope for nothing. Every fool prides himself on not being such a fool as believe what would make a man of him. For dread ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is insufferably conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now condemned to a fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by the price of any book. No man — no human, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... to Edith this theory to account for her presence, she professed to find it highly reasonable, and we proceeded at much length to develop the idea. Falling into the conceit that she was an anticipation of the twentieth-century woman instead of my being an excavated relic of the nineteenth-century man, we speculated what we should do for the summer. We decided to visit the great pleasure resorts, where, no doubt, she would under the circumstances ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... is not selfishness or conceit," said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. "If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the parlour door looking anxiously at his mother. 'Come, come, mother, no harm is done. The boy is mad, and a lot of people here have turned his head by flattering him till he is puffed up, and, like the frog in the fable, is all but bursting with conceit. I'll soon settle matters. He must take away what belongs to him; there's not much, I'll warrant, except his manuscripts in their outlandish trashy language. Now, keep her quiet, Miss Palmer, and don't let ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... after adventures and he had found one of the very largest kind. He had never heard such tremendous roaring growls as the disappointed grisly was now uttering. Between these he could also hear, at no great distance, the mournful howls of One-eye. The sagacious animal had not self-conceit enough to match his weight and size against a brute that could have whipped a lion in five minutes, but he could express his feelings concerning the state ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before."—I put these things down just as they happened, and with the most entire frankness. I know that it will sound like the most pitiable degree of self-conceit. But such perhaps ought to be the state of mind of an author when he does his best. At any rate, I have said nothing of my vainglorious impulse ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... of Fate, Florrie, or the act of God," answered Denman, with a painful smile. "We must have the conceit taken out of us on occasions, you know. Forsythe, my schoolmate, is in command of this ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... this superficial information; but the really wise will soon discover your ignorance, and despise you for affecting a degree of knowledge you do not possess. Besides which, a mere smattering of learning is very apt to fill the mind with self- conceit and vanity, faults from which the really well-informed are always free. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... feel the full significance of the multiplicity of sects. [Sidenote: Multiplicity of sects] "Is there any opinion so fantastical, or conceit so extravagant . . . or opinion so strange," he asked, "that custom hath not established and planted by laws in some region?" Usage sanctions every monstrosity, including incest and parricide in some places, and in others "that unsociable opinion ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... variety of the creation to some purpose, or she was much maligned). "I know that they can't, any of them, see three yards before their noses, and that you can turn and twist them which way you will if you only go upon this principle—that they are full of vanity and self-conceit, and totally deficient ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... Your surplus fat. Your respect for the flag. Your self-conceit. Your love for your mother. Your fastidiousness. Your promptness. Your selfishness. Your democracy. Your ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... was the most curious that ever was. And for the sake of the national peace of mind, the national dignity, and the national conceit, it was allowed to drop into forgetfulness after a few days. And when the papers announced that, by Priam's wish, the Farll museum was to be carried to completion and formally conveyed to the nation, despite all, the nation decided to accept that ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... to generalize a rule, found so necessary practically to be followed, may be resolved into that flattering conceit of human dignity, which is yielded reluctantly, inch by inch, as plain demonstration wrests it away. And further, self-love conceals itself, because generally it operates first to pervert the judgment. The consciousness of ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... stately, beautiful, and emulate at will, Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax, Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson's fair ladies, Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme, delight of singers; These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter, Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer, Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse, And leave ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... might have grieved you. I was not tough enough for the discipline that was needed to strike the balance. (He is thinking aloud, dear fellow.-M. A.) I am afraid I have often vexed you in my crudeness and conceit, but I know you forgive. I am very thankful for this year, and for the way in which my poor mother was given into my hands at last. Fernan has helped me to make a short will, to save confusion ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... long conversation with him; which honour Mr. Jeremiah so far misinterpreted, as to ascribe it to an interest of a very tender character. To Mr. Schnackenberger, who had taken up the very extraordinary conceit that his large person had some attractions about it, there could naturally be nothing very surprising in all this: and he felt himself called upon not to be wanting to himself, but to push his good fortune. Accordingly, he kept constantly about the person of the princess: ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... "Takes all the conceit out of a fellow," he mused, "to find what a lot of his old childish dread remains when he has grown up. Why, I felt then—Ugh! I'm ashamed to think of it all. Poor old Stratton! he doesn't know what he's about half his time. I believe he has got what the doctors call softening of the ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... its action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste and uneasiness, of men who "have no sense of humor," who take themselves too seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of opinion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what, enjoying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves. These are men who have not suffered that wholesome change. They have not come to themselves. If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may conclude that ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... end, "W.S.", probably stand for William Stroud or Strode, whose name is given at length to some other rhymes in the same MS. I should be glad to know if this quaint little conceit has been printed before, and if ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... This system produces a most pernicious influence. Children soon perceive the position thus allowed them, and take every advantage of it. They soon learn to dispute parental requirements, acquire habits of forwardness and conceit, assume disrespectful manners and address, maintain their views with pertinacity, and yield to authority with ill-humor and resentment, as if their rights were ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... despising the beaten track in which more sober and humble spirits have been content to tread, they have indignantly struck into new and untried paths; but these have failed of conducting them to the right object, and have issued only in ignorance and conceit. ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... rediscovered Mr. Cumshaw. He repeated the verb. "Re-discovered" struck a distinctive note. One could not convey the same meaning with any form of the verb "to overtake;" Mr. Cumshaw had disappeared, not simply gone on ahead. He chuckled softly at his own quaint conceit, and at that his spirits began to ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... produced fruits easily described, such as peace and love, and purity, and good works; but instead of these, and threatening their destruction, there had sprung up dissension and strife, party spirit, self-conceit, and gross sins which I need ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... And, forbye, I doobt I wadna be that sair content wi' her noo gin I had her. I used to think her gran'. But I'm clean oot o' conceit o' her. That bonnie leddy's ta'en 't clean oot ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... still higher; the scene in which Iago uses Cassio's conceit and laughter to exasperate further the already mad Othello is one of the notable triumphs of dramatic art. But just as the quick growth of his jealousy, and its terrible sensuality, have shown us that Othello ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... help as you can give. You can't do anything without making a blunder. I should like to knock the conceit out of you." ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... because they were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life; because at the great epoch of Europe's reawakening they chose the wrong side and adhered to it with fatal obstinacy. This obstinacy was disastrous to their neighbors and ruinous to themselves. During the short period of three reigns (between 1598 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... astonishment to this outpouring of conceit. All the great nations had passed through the fever of Imperialism. The Greeks aspired to world-rule because they were the most civilized and believed themselves the most fit to give civilization to the rest of mankind. The Romans, upon conquering countries, implanted law ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Western Islands amply proves, had no serious feeling against Scotchmen as Scotchmen like the settled convictions which made him dislike Presbyterians. But then, as always, the Scot had a specially "gude conceit" of himself and a clannish habit of pushing the interest of his brother Scots wherever he went, so that it was commonly thought that to let a Scot into your house or business was not only to let in one conceited fellow, but to ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... she had been very encouraging to Tom Todd, a young lawyer of the place—a little snob, with self-conceit enough in his dapper body for six larger men. This evening he had been particularly attentive to her. Susie was pretty and quite an heiress, so I knew Tom Todd would try to secure her. He was just that kind of a fellow ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... only perfit, that all imperfections of humane nature, hidden before vnder the simplicitie of childhood, or the lightnes of youth, appeere at this age in their perfection. We speake of none in this place but such as are esteemed the wisest, and most happie in the conceit of the world. We played as you haue seene in feare: our short pleasures were attended on with long repentance. Behold, now present themselues to vs auarice, and ambition, promising if wee will adore ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay
... the castle, and the magnificent prospect from the terrace, I saw much that tended to make up for the disgust I felt at the way in which all that was so appropriate and characteristic in so historic a place as Windsor Castle should have been tampered with and rubbed out by the wretched conceit of the worst architects ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the application of what hath been said, in general, concerning the refinement of theatrical music to the case of tragedy. Some commentators say, and to comedy. But in this they mistake, as will appear presently. M. Dacier hath I know not what conceit about a comparison betwixt the Roman and Greek stage. His reason is, that the lyre was used in the Greek chorus, as appears, he says, from Sophocles himself playing upon this instrument himself in one of his tragedies. And was it not used too in the Roman chorus, ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with him the bitterest possible cud of failure, retired within himself and gloomed angrily at the situation from all points of view. He was completely out of conceit with himself. After he had finished his performance, he naturally took to reviewing it and recasting it in terms of success. If he'd only shot at first, before he lost his breath! If he'd only remembered to get his hand away around the grip of ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... before, had vast confidence in his own powers of persuasion; and general influence with women, and on this occasion, his really handsome features were made vulgar by a smirk of self-conceit which he could not conceal, owing to his natural vanity and a presentiment of success that is almost inseparable from persons of his class, who can scarcely look even upon the most positive and decided rejection ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... call to lay doon t' law, on sic matters at aw. Mappen tha'll recolleck t' Bible—headstrong as tha art i' thy aan conceit. Bit t' Bible says 'How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough—whose taak is o' bullocks?' Aa coom on that yestherday—an A've bin sair exercised aboot thy preachin ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wonderful had he spoken without a bidding. No, no; your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... beard, Abuse o' Magistrates might weel be spar'd: To liken them to your auld-warld squad, I must needs say, comparisons are odd. In Ayr, wag-wits nae mair can have a handle To mouth 'a citizen,' a term o' scandal; Nae mair the Council waddles down the street, In all the pomp of ignorant conceit; Men wha grew wise priggin' owre hops an' raisins, Or gather'd lib'ral views in bonds and seisins, If haply Knowledge, on a random tramp, Had shor'd them with a glimmer of his lamp, And would to Common-sense for once betray'd them, Plain, dull Stupidity ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... with his hands and wept passionately. Strange and terrible were the tears of such a man, welling up from a heart from which all natural affections had seemed to be expelled, to make room for his own exacting, engrossing conceit of self. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Conrade, "his self-conceit and folly lead him to the same conclusions as do Philip's policy and wisdom. He conceives himself, God help the while, ungratefully treated, because men's mouths—even those of his own MINNE-SINGERS [The German minstrels were so termed.]—are filled with the praises of King Richard, whom ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... fragment of a noble but most unfortunate husband, who honestly strove to do right, but whose extraordinary instincts were against him. Try it, Maria. I have thought the matter over carefully and well, and it is the only chance I see for you. It would have been a happy conceit on the part of Caruthers if he had started with his neck and broken that first; but since he has seen fit to choose a different policy and string himself out as long as possible, I do not think we ought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... erewhile made life seem unbearable. For Tolstoy's perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a perroanent ministry ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... has stirred our conceit," said Petit-Claud; "we made it a point of honor to get up a subscription, and we will have a tremendous affair for you. The masters and the headmaster will be there, and, at the present rate, we shall, no ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... one that loves you,' or, if it should so chance, 'And what's-his-name, all the rest, hate you,' and 'I alone am friendly to you, all the rest are engaged in plots,' and other such stuff by which you fill some with elation and conceit, only to betray them, and scare the rest so that you gain their attachment. If any service is rendered by any one whomsoever of the whole people, you lay claim to it and write your own name upon it, repeating: 'I moved it, I proposed ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... to find guts in folks when you're up against it. You can't help it. Maybe it's conceit makes you feel that way," he went on quietly. "Those two boys of mine, and An-ina. You couldn't beat 'em. Nothing could. When Oolak dropped over the side of a canyon, with most of the outfit the reindeer went with him. You see, we'd rid ourselves of the dogs. We couldn't ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... for the exposure of unworthiness. As to the marvellous illusion of conquered love that had visited him for a moment in the agitated watches of the night which might have been his last on earth, he comprehended now its true nature. It had been merely a paroxysm of delirious conceit. Thus to this man sobered by the victorious issue of a duel, life appeared robbed of much of its charm simply because it was no ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... and meet life half-way. Throw yourself at life! The trouble with you and me is that we stand still, all curled up in ourselves as in a chrysalis. You must give yourself room, you must break free from your own selfish conceit, you must reach a point where you don't give a damn about yourself! Do you hear—where all the worrying you do is about others? Then ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Holy Ghost, to serve them. But there is a day fast approaching when (unless there is a universal repentance on the part of the whites, which will scarcely take place—they have got to be so hardened in consequence of our blood, and so wise in their own conceit.) To be plain and candid with you, Americans! I say that the day is fast approaching when there will be a greater time on the continent of America than ever was witnessed upon this earth since it came from the hands of its Creator. Some of you have done ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... one to whom nothing is contemptible. To him, even the follies of his fellow-passengers are manifestations of human nature, revelations of the material from which scholars and politicians no less than drunkards and inconstants are gradually in course of time developed. Somebody described "conceit" to me the other day as egotism in which contempt for others is involved. It was agreed between us that egotism was normal, since happiness is not to be attained without a sense of personal utility to the world, and no objection was urged against it. Vanity was to be tolerated, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would cross the street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had—curious, penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled by self-conceit. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... 'I'm out of conceit with myself,' he said; 'I'm so idle and useless; I wish that were all—I wish myself better, but I'm such a weak coxcomb—a father-confessor might keep me nearer to my duty—some one to scold and exhort me. Perhaps if some charitable lady would take me ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... reached from which no further ascent was possible. He could not imagine anything in the whole world more honourable than to belong to that splendid army of Sedan; and he wore his officer's sword-knot with a pride far removed from any kind of conceit: in fact, nearly ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... benevolence to his own tenants, and with his little gift to your uncle's. Mrs. Fortescue allows him to be the best of landlords: I might have told you that, had I thought it necessary to put you into some little conceit of him. He has qualities, in short, that may make him a tolerable creature on the other side of fifty: but God help the poor woman to whose lot he shall fall till then! women, I should say, perhaps; since he may break half-a-dozen hearts before that time.—But ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... either end seems rather gratuitous. They might be many other things besides true hope and false hope and abundance standing beside the family. But the girl chasing the bubble blown out by false hope makes a quaint conceit to express adventure, though perhaps only one out of a million would see the point if it ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... half proud of it. He was most anxious to be able to give himself credit for his constancy to Lily Dale; to be able to feel that he was steadfast in his passion; and yet he liked the idea of amusing himself with his Bayswater romance, as he would call it, and was not without something of conceit as he thought of the progress he had made in it. "Love is one thing and amusement is another," he said to himself as he puffed the cigar smoke out of his mouth; and in his heart he was proud of his own capacity for enjoyment. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... were also very brave and intelligent officers. The name of one was Cortex and of the other Duplessis. They were senior to me in age, but junior in every other respect. Cortex was a small, dark man, very quick and eager. He was a fine soldier, but he was ruined by his conceit. To take him at his own valuation, he was the first man in ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... family. His wife, naturally of a mild and placid temper, failed in almost every thing to please him, or prevent the constant outbreakings of his morose and peevish humor. He was her tyrant—and so instinct with malevolence, the vain conceit of superiority, jealousy, and obstinate pride, as to resemble more an Arab of the desert, or a person destitute of natural affection, than a person by education and in name, a Christian. As a neighbor, his feelings were so soured ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... my "romantic beauty" might lose its romance, when seen for the second time. Something like this must be the explanation; and I confess to you, Padre, that the failure of the prince to keep our tryst was the biggest disappointment and the sharpest humiliation of my life. It took most of the conceit out of me, and since then I've never been vain of my alleged "looks" or "charm" for more than two minutes on end. I've invariably said to myself, "Remember Jim Wyndham, and how he didn't think you worth the bother of coming ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... people and clergy, and extending to the highest places of the nobility and the episcopate. The anti-Puritan party was the conservative or reactionary party, strong in the vis inertiae, and in the king's pig-headed prejudices and his monstrous conceit of theological ability and supremacy in the church; strong also in a considerable adhesion and zealous cooeperation from among his nominees, the bishops. The religious division was also a political one, the Puritans being known as the party ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the law." These two assumptions have accounted for all of the misunderstanding that has arisen between the West and the East, for China and Japan, India and Egypt can not see by what divine right men from the West suppose that they have the only correct ancestry or by what conceit they presume to have the only true faith. Let them but be accepted, however, let a nation be led by them as guiding-stars, and England becomes justified in forcing her system upon India, she finds it necessary to send missionaries to Japan, and the lion's paw pounces upon the very ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... be desirable to introduce to the lady one was going to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections. He was altogether too good-looking, and, what is more, he had none of that consciousness and conceit about him which usually afflicts handsome men, and makes them ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... had to oppose a clique of young nobles, full of arrogance and self-conceit, but scions of the greatest families. They hoped to recover the ancient ascendency of their houses. The chief of these were the Dukes of Beaufort, Epernon, and Guise. They made use, as their tool, of Madame Chevreuse, the confidential friend of the queen regent. And ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... as, "But, Mr. Frohman, this is my way of doing it," or "I feel it this way," and like manifestations of actors' conceit or argument would never be met with ridicule or contempt. Sometimes he would say, "Try it my way first," or "Do you like that?" or "Does this give you a better feeling?" He never said, "You must do thus and so." He was alert to every suggestion. As a result he got the very ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... beautiful even in death! My poor lighter-boy, that hath mastered the rudiments, and triumphed over the Accidence—but to die! Levior puer, a puerile conceit, yet I love it, as I do thee. How my heart bleeds for thee! The icy breath of death hath whitened thee, as the hoar-frost whitens the autumnal rose. Why wert thou transplanted from thine own element? Young prince of the stream—lord of the lighter—'Ratis rex et magister'—heir ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to the future. Any venture attracts them when hard-up for food; and the more roving it is, the better they like it. The life of the sailor is most particularly attractive to the freed slave; for he thinks, in his conceit, that he is on an equality with all men when once on the muster-rolls, and then he calls all his fellow-Africans "savages." Still the African's peculiarity sticks to him: he has gained no permanent good. The association of white men and the glitter of money merely dazzle him. He apes ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... check by ever so little the class-conceit of those people who think that they can manage the poor man's life better than he can himself; who would take advantage of their education to play ducks and drakes with his personal affairs. For it is my firm belief that in the present phase of national evolution, and as ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... goes for nothing. Well, the conceit of the rising generation is only equalled by—by that o' the one that went before it. But, now, isn't it strange that you are the very man ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a righteous man, and the conviction was now so firmly impressed upon his very soul that nothing could ever shake it. Ezra was wrong when he set this down as deliberate hypocrisy. Blind strength of will and self-conceit were at the bottom of his actions, but he would have been astonished and indignant had he been accused of simulating piety or of using it as a tool. To him the firm of Girdlestone was the very representation of religion in the commercial world, and as such must be ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with wants, and woorse matched with many ill disposed people, that his rare iudgement and regiment premeditated for these affaires, was subiected to tolerate abuses, and in sundry extremities to holde on a course, more to vpholde credite, then likely in his owne conceit ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... brought her, such unexpected pleasures that it seemed as if her heart would burst with gladness; she thought of the girls who had done so much to give her this beautiful holiday; she thought of the scene on the stairs, and of Bertha's words, which, without a particle of conceit, she felt were the truth; she thought of Tom away at college, and wondered if his holiday had been as delightful as hers; she thought of the friends at Silver Bow, of Aunt Maria in the East, of the ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... it," she answered, not able to forbear smiling; "but sit down then, you great, long-legged fellow, you put me out of conceit with this room; you make the ceiling ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... Marie-Jeanne-Brigette, his elder sister, turning him to the intricacies of real estate, made him leave their lodging-place on the rue d'Argenteuil, to purchase a house on the rue Saint-Dominique-d'Enfer, which had formerly belonged to President Lecamus and to Petitot, the artist. Thuillier's conceit and vanity, now that he had become a well-known and important citizen, were greatly flattered when Theodose de la Peyrade hired apartments from him. M. Thuillier was manager of the "Echo de la Bievre," signed a certain ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... was not aboard the Arethusa!" cried Jack Peek, who had followed his captain at a short distance, and looking Tom in the face. "You was not aboard the Arethusa. I'll tell you what kept you down. It was conceit, idleness, drink, and cowardice; and I'll tell you what gave our brave captain his first lift in the service. It was his truthfulness, his good sense, his obedience to the orders of his superiors. It was his soberness, his bravery; and ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... woman's—with such a dimple in her elbow, and a wrist and hand which no glove is small enough to fit—and a noble countenance too. She is 'apprenticed', a name for temporary slavery, and is highly spoken of as a servant, as the Caffres always are. They are a majestic race, but with just the stupid conceit of a certain sort of Englishmen; the ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... into that sleep? What makes them do in one minute something which curses all their lives afterwards? Love of pleasure? Yes: that is a common curse enough, as we all know. But a worse snare than even that is pride and self-conceit. That was what ruined those old Jews. That was what blinded their eyes. They had made up their minds that they saw; therefore they were blind: that they could not go wrong; therefore they went utterly and horribly wrong thenceforth: that ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... A curious conceit, truly! But the prairie is also consecrated, And quite as sacred I think it As Rome's most holy of holies. It blossoms and runs over with religion. These meek and beautiful flowers! What sweet thoughts and divine prayers are in them! These song birds! what anthems of praise Gush out of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have a word or two to say as to myself. From the time when I entered the Indian Country, in May, 1861, to make Treaties, until the beginning of June, 1862, when Gen. Hindman, in the plentitude of his self-conceit and folly, assumed absolute control of the Military and other affairs of the Department of Indian Territory, and commenced plundering it of troops, artillery and ammunition, dictating Military operations, and making the Indian country an ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... something colossal in the odious and the absurd. This figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception—to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my masters!)—seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a Philistine's conceit and his ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... long time deep in thought. Hitherto all I had known of life had been through my family and my work. I had now just had a glimpse of it through society, and I was struck by the hypocrisy of some of the people and the conceit of others. I began to wonder uneasily what I should do, shy and frank as I was. I thought of my mother. She did not do anything, though she was indifferent to everything. I thought of my aunt Rosine, who, on the contrary, liked to mix ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Macaulay had only distinguished between liberty and license, than which no two things in the universe are more diametrically opposed to each other, his passion for fine rhetoric would not have betrayed him into so absurd a conceit respecting the diverse forms of freedom. Liberty is—as we have seen—the bright emanation of reason in the form of law; license is the triumph of blind passion over all law and order. Hence, if we would have liberty, the great deep of human passion ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that when Sir James addressed her, she stared at him in what seemed a fit of shyness. And when she began to talk it was at random, for her mind was in a tumult. But Sir James soon divined her. Vulgarity, conceit, ill-breeding—the great lawyer detected them in five minutes' conversation. Nor were they unexpected; for he was well acquainted with Miss Fanny's origins. Yet the perception of them made the situation still more painfully interesting to him, and no less mysterious than before. For ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... patent leather shoes, he would feel grateful. "To keep old Mack disinvolved," thinks I, "from relapses like this, is worth more than a thousand dollars." And most of all I was glad that I'd made a study of women, and wasn't to be deceived any by their means of conceit and evolution. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... conclude, I think it proper to say, that I have suppressed[1151] every thing which I thought could really hurt any one now living. Vanity and self-conceit indeed may sometimes suffer. With respect to what is related, I considered it my duty to 'extenuate nothing, nor set down aught in malice[1152];' and with those lighter strokes of Dr. Johnson's satire, proceeding from a warmth and quickness of imagination, not from any malevolence ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... his bearing were all exceptional, and told highly in his favour,—but unfortunately his scholarly acumen and knowledge of literature went against him with his manager. This personage, who was densely ignorant, and who yet had all the ineffable conceit of ignorance, took him severely to task for knowing Shakespeare's meanings better than he did,—and high words resulted in mutual severance. Aubrey was hardly sorry when his theatrical career came thus untimely to an end. At first he had imagined it possible to become supreme ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Insular conceit could surely scarcely go further. However, the Edinburgh Reviewer is forgotten and his name unknown; Pinel's name covered with glory, although not a popular hero; for when I made a pilgrimage to his grave in the great Paris cemetery, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule and discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far as it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is born of vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means to an end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of circumstances and consequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very considerable nuisance to the community at large. To those who ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... find no place in a virtuous or humble heart. He who seeks a dignity either knows himself unqualified, and is on this account guilty of the most flagrant injustice with regard to the public, by desiring a charge to which he is no ways equal: or he thinks himself qualified for it, and this self-conceit and confidence in his own abilities renders him the most unworthy of all others. Such a disposition deprives a soul of the divine assistance, without which we can do nothing; for God withdraws his grace and refuses his blessing where self-sufficiency and pride have found any footing. It is something ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... probably would not understand. Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent. Fortunately you don't know all that, or your conceit ...
— The American • Henry James
... And proudly, I could love thee, did not anger Consult with just disdain, in open language To call thee most ungrateful. Say freely, Wilt thou resign the flatteries whereon The reeling pillars of a popular breath Have rais'd thy Giant-like conceit, to add A suffrage to thy ...
— The Laws of Candy - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... have been a very clever old dame, for she knew when to keep silent. As for Betty, she grew to be a very modest, useful hen, with no pride or conceit about her. ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his 'tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide,' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Fac-totum, is in his own conceit the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Midsummer is good, for casting and timely before Iuly is not euill. I much like M Markhams opinion for hiuing a swarme in combes of a dead or forsaken hiue, so they be fresh & cleanly. To thinke that a swarme of your owne, or others, will of it selfe come into such an hiue, is a meere conceit. Experto crede Roberto. His smearing with honey, is to no purpose, for the other Bees will eate it vp. If your swarme knit in the top of a tree, as they will, if the winde beate them not to fall downe: let the stoole or ladder described in the ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... small figure was drawn up to its fullest, and the thin little lithe arms were curved with a studied grace, as Papillon slid and tripped across the room, her dainty little features illumined by a smirk of ineffable conceit. ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... on to the old Post Road between Boston and New York, but I've told you already how Jack and I feel about Post Roads, and wouldn't dream of writing the words without capitals. It may be conceited (or isn't it conceit to boast of one's husband?), but I don't believe most of the automobilious travellers we met, evidently native-grown Americans, knew or cared half as much about the history of every mile as did my English Jack. You can guess ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... the poor little soul," Grace declared. "I'm sure she belongs to enough charitable boards and committees so that she ought to be delighted that we bring a real 'case,' as she calls them, to her," and Grace laughed at her own conceit. ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... beneath the flowing wigs of the Stuart period. He had long wanted to do a statue of the ill-fated Monmouth, and another greater than that. Here was the very man: with a proud, daring, homeless look, a splendid body, and a kind of cavalier conceit. It was significant of him, of his attitude towards himself where his work was concerned, that he suddenly turned and shut the door again, telling Falby, who appeared, to go to his room; and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Rosalind Merton, sidling up to Maggie and casting some disdainful glances at poor Priscilla, "the conceit of some people! Of all forms of conceit, preserve ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... her right ear during the harangue. Over the culprit's countenance light had dawned, but, shame to tell! it was a light not wholly remorseful. Then silent laughter shook the old man's shoulders, and then—could it be?—there crept about his lips and eyes a smile of superbly masculine conceit. The sisters were fighting over him. Wouldn't Mother be amused when he should tell her what all this ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... me with a look of curiosity, and another sort of look also that made me tremble, and said, 'Now, there you have put your finger on the point—my point, the choice weapon I had reserved to prick the little bubble of Bigot's hate and the Governor's conceit, if I so chose, even at the last. And here is a girl, a young girl just freed from pinafores, who teaches them the law of nations! If it pleased me I should not speak, for Vaudreuil's and Bigot's affairs are none of mine; but, in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... democracy it is fitting that a man should sit on a throne to have his shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, gayer word, shined. We are all kings, and this happy conceit of popular government is nicely symbolized by being, for these shining moments, so many kings together, each on his similar throne and with a slave at his feet. The democratic idea suffers a little from ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... the forecastle had acquired for Done was vastly increased by his rescue of Lucy Woodrow. Conduct that had previously been ascribed to mere conceit was now accounted for by most romantic imaginings, for it is a cardinal belief amongst men of their class that the true fighter is superior to all little weaknesses and small motives. When the girl crossed the ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... along the pathway Ralph Cranfield sat in an oaken elbow-chair half unconsciously gazing at the three visitors and enveloping their homely figures in the misty romance that pervaded his mental world. "Here," thought he, smiling at the conceit—"here come three elderly personages, and the first of the three is a venerable sage with a staff. What if this embassy should bring me the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... some interior parts of the continent where they can not be dangerous. This mode of proceeding I conceive (if any can) will be effectual—but whether it meets with the approbation or disapprobation of the congress, I most humbly conjure them not to attribute the proposal to arrogance, or self-conceit, or pragmatical officiousness, but, at worst, to an intemperate zeal for the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... your meaning, and put in a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... is kindled from brand Till it is burnt out; Fire is kindled from fire; A man gets knowledge By talk with a man, But becomes wilful by self-conceit. Ha'vama'l. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... course not,' echoed Henrietta, 'when he's buried like a delicate Sphinx up to his shoulders in the sands of your good opinion, and the mummy cloths of his own conceit; but just remove these, and you'll see a downfall. My dear FRANCESCA, this man is your CECCO, and he'd far better retire into a monastery than hope to win you. Why, I'd rather marry you myself, FRANCESCA! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... they are not willing to practise themselves, and upon the other part, to many errors and abuses, to which the godly through their weaknes may fall, or by the craftinesse of others may be drawn into, such as are Error, Heresie, Schisme, Scandal, Self-conceit, and despising of others, pressing above the common calling of Christians, and usurping that which is proper to the Pastoral Vocation, contempt or misregard of the publike means idle and unprofitable ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... Death his court; and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp; Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and humored thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores through his castle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... blush. A Rev. E. Neale has clumsily altered the Pilgrim's Progress, that Bunyan might appear to teach the things which Bunyan's righteous heaven-born soul abhorred. It is a piece of matchless self-conceit to think of mending that which has been admired by the wisest of the human race in all nations, and which has obtained an unbounded popularity. Such an attempt to alter it is an acknowledgment that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and friendship. Whenever it shall strike you that my pen begins to contract, as it were, the ossification of old age, whenever you see my genius in its climateric, do not fail to give me a hint. There is no trusting to one's self in such a case: pride and conceit were the original sin of man. The probe of criticism must be entrusted to an impartial stander-by, of fine talents and unshaken probity. Both those requisites center in you: you are my choice, and I give myself ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... and suppressed envy—perhaps your fathers' conceit and envy: in you break they forth as flame and ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a window and saw some one reading," thought Amy; and she smiled so sweetly at the conceit that Webb asked, "How many pennies will you ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... to making bows. Nor, as it happened, was I when all was done. This confidence was partly owing to full feeding on fine porridge and braxy, but more to that inbred belief of Galloway in itself which the ill-affected and envious nominate its conceit. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... when I thought he liked it as well as we did, Peggy. And he was beginning to hold his own with us. There was wit in the conceit of naming his ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... in a tone of withering sarcasm. "So, Mister Gascoyne, ye've got sich an uncommon cargo o' conceit in ye yet, that you actually think ye could go back without so much as saying, ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... Philippus praised Paula's dignified grandeur, her superior elegance, the height of her stature or the loftiness of her mind, the old man would bound up exclaiming: "Of course—of course!—Beware boy, beware! You are disguising haughtiness, conceit, and arrogance under noble names. The word 'patrician' includes everything we can conceive of as most insolent and inhuman; and those apes in purple who disgrace the Imperial throne pick out the worst of them, the most ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had driven all thoughts of doubt out of her mind. She would not have denied herself of his company now for any foolish pretext of convention. In that hurried summary of himself and his affairs, proving himself by it, without any pride and conceit, to be a man of very different stamp and interest to Mr. Arthur Montagu, he had marked her in her flight for liberty. Nothing was binding her—no interest in life but to be loved. Had there been any such bond—the prospect of an engagement which was not ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em. This Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own. For his Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
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