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More "Conventionality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... telling me some of them?' said Mrs. Fordyce rather anxiously. She was a very practical person—attentive to the laws of conventionality, and she did not feel at all sure of the views entertained by her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Grant, if you're really willing to see me through this," Dauntrey said, clinging to those bare rocks of conventionality which still rose above the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... spoke? And if it is not profanation to hear and see this in the pages of a biography, why is it a profanation to read and see it in the pages of a magazine? To object to it seems to me to be a species of prudish conventionality. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we should drop down to Luchon, and come around by Bagnerres-de-Bigorre or not, but since they were likely to be full of "five-o'-clockers" at this season we thought the better of it, and left them entirely out of our itinerary. When one wants it he can get the same sort of conventionality at Ermenonville, and need not go so far afield ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... of the North in order to shield himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new school in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions, literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter; but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... truth, but in its essence just as real and permanent as the artistic worth of romance. "Seen from afar," writes Mr. Moore, "all things in nature are of equal worth; and the meanest things, when viewed with the eyes of God, are raised to heights of tragic awe which conventionality would limit to the deaths of kings and patriots." On such a lofty theory they built their treatment and their style. It is a mistake to suppose that the realist school deliberately cultivates the sordid or shocking. Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's Mummer's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... not make two of him, but we think there ought to be another, and we try to be he. The attempt is always a failure. The worst of it is that in our effort to be another we have ceased to be ourselves, and after such a loss what do we still possess? Perhaps the disaster comes in another way. Conventionality has certain curious notions about the pulpit, the fulfilment of which it paradoxically despises as it demands it. The preacher is expected to speak in a different voice and wear a different expression in the "sacred desk" from his voice and expression in other places. In some churches he ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... new sensations. This one woman of all the world beside his mother and sister that he had come to know somewhat was to him a strange, beautiful mystery. Edith was in many respects conventional, as all society girls are, but it was the conventionality of a sphere of life that Arden knew only through books, and she seemed to him utterly different from the ladies of Pushton as he understood them from his slight acquaintance. This difference was all in her favor, for he cherished a bitter ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... not beheld in the same cruel position as yourself! Artists who live only by and for the public, carry nothing home to their hearth but fatigue from glory, or the melancholy of their disappointments. An ill-regulated existence, without compass or rudder, subversive ideas contrary to all social conventionality, contempt of family life and its happiness, cerebral excitement sought for in the abuse of tobacco and strong drink, without mentioning anything else, this constitutes the terrible artistic element from which your dear Aunt is desirous of withdrawing you; but I must ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... of the literary Trinity, the Second and Third being Custom and Conventionality. Imbued with a decent reverence for this Holy Triad an industrious writer may hope to produce books that will live as ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... that, not having wherewith to console him, he listened to those who are said to intoxicate him with such exaltation, verses, and rhymes, as they had never demonstrated to others; because this work shines more by its originality than by its conventionality. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... adjacent benefice, and he also became a prebendary of York. It was not until 1760 that the first two vols. of his famous novel, Tristram Shandy, appeared. Its peculiar and original style of humour, its whimsicality, and perhaps also its defiance of conventionality, and even its frequent lapses into indecorum, achieved for it an immediate and immense popularity. S. went up to London and became the lion of the day. The third and fourth vols. appeared in 1761, the fifth ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... succour was always at her elbow in the shape of her husband's loyal support. There was no condition involved which could not be explained to her credit; adequate compensation for the merry sacrifice was to be had in the brief detachment from rigid English conventionality, in the hazardous injection of quixotism into an otherwise overly healthful life of platitudes. Society had become the sepulchre of youthful inspirations; she welcomed the resurrection. The exquisite delicacy with which she analysed the cost and computed the interest won for her the warmest ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... allowed to rot on top of the grave. To me there is no more mournful sight than a visit to a great London cemetery, where one sees these rotting emblems, which quite palpably meant nothing save the practice of a conventionality. The Japanese, however poor his worldly circumstances may be, is not content with flowers, costly flowers on the day of the funeral; he places his vase alongside the grave of the departed, and by keeping that vase filled with fresh and beautiful flowers he sets forth as far as he possibly ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... had already given to a name once so respectable. He knew that his indifference and overbearing manner toward his sisters had alienated them from him; while in respect to Mrs. Haldane, her aristocratic conventionality, the most decided trait of her character, would always be in sharp contest with her strong mother-love, and thus he would ever be only a source of disquiet and wretchedness whether present or absent. In view of the discordant elements and relations ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote: ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... you can construct the whole story: you know that the "dependent cousin" and the girl with the "handsome brunette features" will be rivals for the affections of some "nice young man" of corresponding conventionality, and that the poor relation will finally win him—chiefly because it always happens so in stories and seldom in real life. And you know from these specimen paragraphs that there will be nothing in the handling ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... a failure, her calm assurance and self- certainty offended him vaguely. It seemed as if she were succeeding where he had failed, which rather jarred his sense of the fitness of things. Then, too, conventionality is a very agreeable social bond, the true value of which is not often recognized until it is found missing, and this girl was anything ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... was as far as she ventured in allusion to her widowed state; but, stirred as he was by her implied submission, it struck him as significant that she should so clearly recognize the restrictions conventionality imposed on her. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully his life in secret, and clandestinely to shake off the hypocrisy of the day, resembles an Italian who strikes ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... wonderfully during those hours of companionship. The total absence of conventionality had destroyed all strangeness between them. They were as children on a holiday, enjoying the present to the full, and wholly ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... which are to be met with in philosophical works as elsewhere, are not to be frequently encountered in his writings. There is always the fresh breeze of original thought blowing here. He is by nature as well as by doctrine the sworn foe of conventionality. Though he may not give us all we would wish, in our haste to be all-wise, let us yet be grateful to him for this, that he has the purpose and also the power to shake us out of complacency, to compel us to recast our philosophical account. In this he is supremely serviceable ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... regard to minor matters, he does not, like some of his contemporaries, place in the mouth of a Huguenot leader, or a Guisarde countess, the tame and dainty phrase appropriate enough in that of an equerry, or lady of the bed-chamber at the court of the Citizen King. Eschewing conventionality, and following his own judgment, and the guidance of the old chroniclers, in whose quaint records he delights, he has written one of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... scene of all her troubles, of all the terrible emotions that had swept over her life in the last three weeks, to be alone in the hills or by the sea. It seemed dreadful to be tied to her great house in the city, in her mourning, shut off suddenly from the world, and bound down by the chain of conventionality to a fixed method of existence. She would give anything to go away. Why not? She suddenly realised what was so hard to understand, that she was free to go where she pleased—if only, by accident, she could chance to meet Giovanni Saracinesca before ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of the best and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... I am sure," she murmured; and the very conventionality of her tones and words, with the host of associations it aroused of the old life on the other side of the world, gave me a quick thrill—rich with remembrance ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Ayres—they say who have travelled far—could show such a procession of Dianaides, such a Greek festival of joy in the smooth, vigorous body and the things which feed and clothe it. With that absence of public conventionality which was another ear-mark of the old city, all sorts and conditions of men and women sat side by side at the tables. Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... a brave woman and help him," Thornton said, feeling the conventionality and silliness of any remark. "He mustn't be hounded out of here like a dog, but made to feel that he can make a decent future." She nodded. "It isn't the money," she said at last. "Though I can't see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual disgrace. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... had come to Middelburg. I looked out again. Nell was on deck alone. Doubtless Alb had at last gone below to the motor-room, and was exchanging the blue overalls for something more decorous. Would he, even for the sake of conventionality, have left her at such a moment unless ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... distinctively emotional are nearly identical among men from physiological causes which do not affect with the same similarity the processes of thought. The large number of corporeal gestures expressing intellectual operations require and admit of more variety and conventionality. Thus the features and the body among all mankind act almost uniformly in exhibiting fear, grief, surprise, and shame, but all objective conceptions are varied and variously portrayed. Even such simple indications as those for "no" and "yes" appear in ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... subjects, for one of Browning's most eminent qualities is his care in harmonising treatment with subject. King Victor and King Charles is a modern play, dealing with human nature under all the restrictions of a pervading conventionality and an oppressive statecraft. It deals, moreover, with complex and weakened emotions, with the petty and prosaic details of a secondary Western government. The Return of the Druses, on the other hand, treats of human nature in its most romantic conditions, of the mystic East, of great and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... reason seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality. The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... is not all a conventionality, for it is the best proof of their proper nature. The tribune stopped, because they fled from him—not with fear, be it said, but shame; nor yet, O reader, from shame alone! From the obscurity of their partial hiding he heard these words, the saddest, most dreadful, most utterly ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... is just a delightful expression of mutual love. It is a sort of prolonged and all-embracing kiss, in which the sex organs are included as well as the lips. They kiss each other, as the lips kiss each other. It is "courting," par excellence, without the hampering of clothes or conventionality of any kind. ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... persons lose all the zest of living. The existing world seems to them brutal, its order, tyranny; its morality, organized selfishness; its accepted religion, a shallow conventionality. In such a world as this, the good man stands like a gladiator who has suddenly become a Christian. He is overwhelmed with horror at the bloody sports, yet he is forced into the arena and must fight. That is his business, and he cannot rise ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... had spread from bourgeois to countess, from cure to Parisian boulevardier, till the entire side of the table was in a buzz of talk. These genial people of a genial land finding themselves all in search of the same adventure, on top of a hill, away from the petty world of conventionality, remembered that speech was given to man to communicate with his fellows. And though neighbors for a brief hour, how charming such an hour can be made when into it are crowded the effervescence of personal experience, the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119} mother. The Duchess ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... friend—you will allow me that word!—to what you condemn me if you take your stand upon the extreme dictates of conventionality. You cannot know what it would mean to me if you were to say, 'He is a married man, and we had better not meet so frequently in future.' To you, that would be no loss whatever. To me, it would be the loss of happiness, of consolation, of intellectual life. Listen and have pity upon me! ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... at last given up in despair even by Speug, their tails being renewed day by day and their faces remaining in all circumstances quite unmoved; but within a month the average boy had laid aside the last remnant of conventionality, and was only outdone by Peter himself in studied ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... 'amiable, kind, generous, and forgiving.' Further on he adds: 'He had smiled so often and so long, that at last his smile had the appearance of being set in enamel.' But then, Mr. Haydon prided himself on his coarseness, defiance, and hatred of conventionality, deeming these fitting attributes of ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... their parts in the drama of Royal Courts, but scarcely one, not even those Messalinas, Catherine II. of Russia and Christina of Sweden, conducted herself with such a shameless disregard of conventionality as Marie Louise Elizabeth d'Orleans, known to fame as the Duchesse de Berry, who probably crowded within the brief space of her years more wickedness than any woman who was ever cradled in ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and all the so-called aspiration of Gothic architecture ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... as was absolutely necessary, and with as little meaning as conventionality required, Nekhludoff rose and went up to Meslennikoff. "Can you give me a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... other great balls, the rocky shores of conventionality made it impossible to move without a thousand ceremonies, proprieties, dubiosities, formalities, and all the rest, which, taken together, make up a vast sum of difficulties. The great ball at Axelholm was not without pretension, and on that ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... not a small one. The careful study which he had given to the proper conditions of opera was not likely to exclude so important a question as that of the construction and diction of the libretto, and the poem of 'Orfeo' shows so marked an inclination to break away from the conventionality and sham sentiment of the time that we can confidently attribute much of its originality to the influence of the composer himself. The opening scene shows the tomb of Eurydice erected in a grassy valley. Orpheus stands beside it plunged in the deepest grief, while ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and here and here alone, she and Susan ran an even race, it being a moot point each week which would gain the highest marks. Susan's essays were more thoughtful, and were written with an apt and dainty choice of words which was a delight to Miss Drake's literary taste, but a certain primness and conventionality still remained to be conquered, in contrast to which Dreda's dashing breeziness of style was a real refreshment. After reading through a dozen essays, all of which began in almost exactly the same words, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hates conventionality and uses the old thrills only to show what dead batteries they come from. His really electrical effects are his own inventions. He needs no dungeon keeps and monkish cells to play about in—not he! He demands no rag nor bone nor clank of chain of his old ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... went on the alarm had become more pronounced; but at this moment, when there shone forth the mother-instinct which had never come out or blossomed in her life, but had been overlaid completely with routine and conventionality, rendering it too indolent to put forth petals, Michael had no thought but for that which she had never given him yet, and which, now it began to expand before him, he knew he had missed all ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... civilization, by the many false practices which it has introduced, by the facilities which its very complexity affords to the concealment of crime, and by the monstrous systems of corruption which fashion, caste, and conventionality are enabled to shelter, is the direct means of rendering many individuals miserable in the extreme; but these are the necessary incidents to its struggles to advance under the dominion ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... mother and sister, black-uniformed, looking very much a gentleman. 'I, of course, am not a gentleman,' he said to himself, gloomily. Was there any chance that he might some day take his ease in that orthodox fashion? Inasmuch as it was conventionality, he scorned it; but the privileges which it represented had strong control of his imagination. That lady and her daughter would follow the play with intelligence. To exchange comments with them would be a keen delight. As for him—he had a shop-boy on one hand and a grocer's ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the woman who is about to become a mother. Most of these questions are reasonable and natural, and should be frankly answered; but a false conventionality has—until recently, at least—forbidden any open discussion of facts connected with childbirth. The inevitable result has been that, without experience of their own to guide them, prospective mothers have sought ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... of idealism in the life of to-day which Mr. Street ignores. This is the tendency toward the apotheosis of the individual in antithesis to society. This is a sign of health, in so far as it is a revolt against the stifling pressure of outworn conventionality, and it has found worthy expression in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer and the poetry of Browning and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the famous recumbent figure on the extreme left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, [267] these figures all smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies of the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he speaks of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... for education in the eternal truths of literary art, and for personal aid in the realisation of its members' literary potentialities. It is a university, stripped of every artificiality and conventionality, and thrown open to all without distinction. Here may every man shine according to his genius, and here may the small as well as the great writer know the bliss of appreciation and the glory of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities in the creations of the past. It is true that with ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... fool talks pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities of life. 'Tis the lover keeps this old world young. The fire of youth, of eternal laughing youth, runs flaming through his blood. His days are radiant, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... day at the ranchhouse was the beginning of a new existence for Ruth. Bound for years by the narrow restrictions and conventionality of the Poughkeepsie countryside, she found the spaciousness and newness of this life inviting and satisfying. Here there seemed to be no limit, either to the space or to the flights that one's soul might take, and in the solemn grandeur of the open she felt the omnipotence ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in between him and his pure apprehension. Thus, and thus only, can a man tread the path among the stars. Thus it is, I think, that religious persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human affections and human aims, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed Hedonist, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... women, who conduct themselves with appropriate freedom from the restraints of conventionality. FERNANDE, who is too lachrymose to be a cheerful feature, is wisely placed on guard at the outer door. The company proceed to play at faro, the bank being the loser. There is a false alarm of police, and the game is suddenly stopped. The Banker, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... by heart a good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to see how small is the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... of courts, and pompous crowning of kings and queens, grand and splendid as they are, have not such spiritual fragrance as these village queen-makings; soft glimmerings and shinings-through of the light of a better world—a world with which man, let conventionality disguise him as it may, always has ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... respectable in every way, should smoke cigarettes, seemed to Lesley to justify all that she had heard against her father's Bohemian household. She could not get over it. Sarah had got over this outrage on conventionality, but she was not yet prepared to forgive Lesley for having lived in ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... she had been to break through the conventionality which surrounded her—and it had required some nerve—so as to be able to come here alone, on this one of ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... She never would forget the look in that man's eyes. The look might have been in other men's eyes, but conventionality had always veiled it; she ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... noble, that anything she might say would be inane, tawdry, inconsequent; so she waited, patiently happy, taking no count of time, nor the sunshine, nor the lilt of the birds, nor even the dissolution of conventionality in the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... it not very hard,' cried Sophy, 'that even you, who own all her excellences, should turn against him, and give in to all this miserable conventionality, that wants riches and station, and trumpery worldly things, and crushes down true love in ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasionally seditious, but always subtle intrigue, the constructive and progressive policy of the upper part of the town, near the railway bridge, being in direct opposition to the destructive statesmanship and constitutional conventionality of the lower residential quarter embracing the timber-yard, Elijah Square, and Aunt Martha's Soda Fountain. Naturally Jabez Puffwater, whose modest store stood figuratively and literally at the crossing of the ways, was always in a somewhat uncertain state of mind as to which side ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the gods make mad those whom they would destroy has a significance not always considered. For when a man loses his intellectual equilibrium, a baseness of character which never broke through the crust of conventionality may be suddenly revealed; and when a wicked system goes mad, such depths of perfidy are disclosed as few imagined to exist. During the last two years, while our Southern sky has been aglow with the red light of the slave-masters' insurrection, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you come upon one who dreams—perhaps vaguely but still longingly—of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... The change from fierce earnestness to this subdued conventionality of tone bewildered ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... symptoms as the temperature, the pulse and the rate of respiration, the learned pundit passes them over without a word. Mrs. Elsie Clews Parsons would be a good one to write a sober and accurate treatise upon kissing. Her books upon "The Family" and "Fear and Conventionality" indicate her possession of the right sort of learning. Even better would be a work by Havelock Ellis, say, in three or four volumes. Ellis has devoted his whole life to illuminating the mysteries of sex, and his collection of materials is unsurpassed in the world. Surely there must ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... I discovered fairy glades in their depths, where the grass was thin and pale, and strong ferns grew about the roots of the trees. Sometimes Mr. Longworth would accompany me on my trips of exploration, and, happy in our youth and the gladness of summer, and forgetful of strict conventionality, we would spend long mornings together, writing and reading in an especially cosy spot at the edge of the woods back of the farm. Mr. Longworth was growing so strong that Wilson's position was almost entirely a sinecure, and he spent most of his ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marry him as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, and felt that she recognised her mission in the world—to follow and aid this maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the less, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after she had provided herself, by the sale of a portion of her dowry, with a sum, as La Mara says, of a million roubles—equal ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... home, and the WORLD dictates prudence; but I know your views on conventionality are those I too have learned to share, so will you come and see me before ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... a tall, and rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... island are before conventionality, and share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... "How be 'ee, my dear?" to any girl he chooses, and perhaps takes her arm for a few steps. Given half a chance, he snatches a playful kiss. They never seem to turn rusty with him. He has the primitive quality of knocking their conventionality to ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... given to the problems that will follow: thus, science as a whole is relative to the particular order in which the problems happen to have been put. It is in this meaning, and to this degree, that science must be regarded as conventional. But it is a conventionality of fact so to speak, and not of right. In principle, positive science bears on reality itself, provided it does not overstep the limits of its own ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Clarence, stepped from the train at the depot of the capital city of their State—which must, for obvious reason, be nameless—and were driven to the Young Ladies' Institute, where the girl was left, and as the adieus were being said it was explained to Cora that discretion and social conventionality dictated that her correspondence with young Rothsay should cease. Clarence stated that he would write to the youth and explain that the rules of the school, also, ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... charm of the fresh young voice that came down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, strong, Western sky. Everything ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... 83} conformity, conformance; observance; habituation. naturalization; conventionality &c (custom) 613; agreement &c 23. example, instance, specimen, sample, quotation; exemplification, illustration, case in point; object lesson; elucidation. standard, model, pattern &c (prototype) 22. rule, nature, principle; law; order of things; normal state, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... spirits so irresistible, that Miss Hargrove found her own nerves tingling with pleasure. The episode was novel, unexpected, and promised so much for the future, that in her delightful excitement she cast conventionality to the winds, and yielded to his sportive mood. They had not gone a mile together before one would have thought they had been acquainted for years. Burt's frank face was like the open page of a book, and the experienced society girl saw nothing ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... gone, she reproached herself for having put such a question to him. At the pass things had reached, it was surely best for him to go through with his infatuation, and get over it. Whereas she, in a spasm of conventionality, had pointed him out the sure road to perdition; for the worst thing that could happen would be for him to bind himself to Louise, in any fashion. As if her reputation mattered! The more rapidly she got rid of what remained to her, the better it would be for every one, and particularly ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... sacrifice would probably be common. What the gods do and what their worshippers do in their service cannot according to Hindu opinion be judged by ordinary laws of right and wrong. The god is supra-moral: the worshipper when he enters the temple leaves conventionality outside. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the precise footprints in which every one else speaks, moves, walks, was the only evidence of honesty. What is a man's individuality worth, if it is to be trodden out in the treadmill tramp of senseless conventionality?" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... autobiography Goethe has revealed to us that his works are fragments of a great confession. Moods of his pre-Weimar storm and stress vibrate in his Iphigenia—feverish unrest, defiance of conventionality, Titanic trust in his individual genius, self-reproach, and remorse for guilt toward those he loved,—Friederike and Lili. Thus feeling his inner conflicts to be like the sufferings of Orestes, he wrote in a letter, August, 1775, shortly after returning to Frankfurt from ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... take precedence of schooling," said Mrs. Sproul, as her mischievous old eyes snapped at Mrs. Cockrell's placid conventionality. "The correct order is for women to take husbands and then school children should be the inevitable outcome. They are not, however, in this day and generation, which is about to be ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... primitive raciness and produces none of the fine fruits of our civilization, a moral sense, honor and conscience. Danton has no respect for himself nor for others; the nice, delicate limitations that circumscribe human personality, seem to him as legal conventionality and mere drawing-room courtesy. Like a Clovis, he tramples on this, and like a Clovis, equal in faculties, in similar expedients, and with a worse horde at his back, he throws himself athwart society, to stagger ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... copied him.... His rules in art were: You shall see things as they are; and the least with the greatest, because God made them; and the greatest with the least, because God made you, and gave you eyes and a heart; he threw aside all glitter and conventionality, and the most significant thing in all his work is his choice of moments." Cimabue still painted the Holy Family in the old conventional style, "but Giotto came into the field, and saw with his simple eyes a lowlier worth; and he painted the Madonna, St. Joseph, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in her beauty, secure in her selfishness, strong over others' weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... the fact that you belong to the royal family to interfere with your fun, Beatrice. If you want to wear a Mother Hubbard dress on the throne during hot weather, or mash a mosquito with your mother's sceptre, do so. Conventionality is a humbug and a nuisance, and I'd just as soon tell you right here that if I could have gone to your wedding and worn a linen coat and a perspiration, I would have gone; but to stand around there all ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... her cheeks with deathly pallor, and the smile, which occasionally played around her lips, seemed but a painful expression of mental suffering. Suddenly she raised her head, as if determined no longer to bear this constraint, or submit to the fetters of conventionality. ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... as it is, the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types of all feminine and childish loveliness;—that in a northern climate, and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around him, he yet became a colourist ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the shrug-shoulder smile of critics at my sub-title—a Romance. There are canons and rubrics to be observed, it would seem, in the slightest action that a man attempts in this Great World's Fair of Conventionality, whose every sideshow is hedged around with the red-tape of the Law. Witness even that delusive proverb—there is honour amongst thieves. So is there an unwritten canon in literature and the making of books, that a Romance must end with a phrase ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... stomach, with a lofty forehead, with a smooth double chin resting pulpily on a white cravat. Everything in harmony about him except his eyes, and these were so sharp, bright and resolute that they seemed to contradict the bland conventionality which overspread all the rest of the man. Eyes with wonderful intelligence and self-dependence in them; perhaps, also, with something a little false in them, which I might have discovered immediately under ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... step. Orde followed at full speed. When the bottom was reached, he steadied her to a halt. She shook herself, straightened her hat, and wound the veil around it. Her whole aspect seemed to have changed with the descent into the conventionality of the village street. The old, gentle though capable and self-contained reserve had returned. She moved ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... group passages where the Gospels tell of Jesus surprising or shocking his disciples—startling them by some act or some opinion, for which they were not prepared, or which was contrary to common belief or practice—passages, too, where he blames or criticizes them for conventionality ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... friend, you shut up," said the dragon severely. "Believe me, St. George," he went on, "there's nobody in the world I'd sooner oblige than you and this young gentleman here. But the whole thing's nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There's absolutely nothing to fight about, from beginning to end. And anyhow I'm not going to, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... in our isolation upon those Yorkshire moors from the trammels of conventionality (one might almost say, civilization!), that I think we should have come to begrudge the ordinary interchange of the neighbourly courtesies of life, but for occasional lectures from Mrs. Arkwright, and for going out visiting from time ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Ei! ei! "The devil has long arms." He recalled this saying of the Siberian priests and the mad Cossack answer: "Therefore let us ride fast!" The swaying of the yacht was like the rhythmic motion of his Arab through the long grass beyond the Dnieper, in that wild land where conventionality and laws were ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and commonplace, which, it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not, like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has gone out into country fields and village lanes, and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Mrs. ——'s disposition; or, at least, I would fain have her power of self- control and concealment; but I would not take her artificial habits and ideas along with her composure. After all I should prefer being as I am. . . You do right not to be annoyed at any maxims of conventionality you meet with. Regard all new ways in the light of fresh experience for you: if you see any honey gather it." . . . "I don't, after all, consider that we ought to despise everything we see in the world, merely because it is not what we are ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... here—in your house—hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath. Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... able to see now that her pale composure was maintained only by an effort, that the strain of it was making her tremble. He answered in tones of careful conventionality. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... perform the greater service—that of presenting the fresh-coloured, discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to her private consternation such perilous ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee's soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it. All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection. In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong. To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Senate. As the third person of the Jacobin brotherhood, Lyman Trumbull had always been out of place. He had gone wrong not from perversity of the soul but from a mental failing, from the lack of inherent light, from intellectual conventionality. But he was a good man. One might apply to him Mrs. Browning's line: "Just a good man made a great man." And in his case, as in so many others, sheer goodness had not been sufficient in the midst of a revolution to save his soul. To ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... shoots of everlastingness—this is what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting sun—in such a place of ink. If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside. He himself would hover beneficently in the ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... not in him alone that I find this fault, but in nearly all foreign actors. There seems to be a limit of passion within which they remain true in their rendering of nature; but beyond that limit they become transformed, and take on conventionality in their intonations, exaggeration in their gestures, and mannerism in their bearing. I left my box saying to myself: "I too can do Hamlet, and I will try it!" In some characters Irving is exceptionally fine. I am convinced that it would be difficult to interpret Shylock or Mephistopheles better ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... movements were always picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... her—even the friends of the robbed girl, for that presupposes some lack in her charm, and gives publicity to her loss. The wronged girl, because of her pride and conventionality and civilization, makes no outcry. A barbarian in her place would have fallen on the robber girl in a fury and scratched her eyes out. Sometimes I am sorry that our barbaric days ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... impossible to keep it down. And he was ashamed of it—ashamed of the thought that for an instant was in his mind. The soul of the wild, little mountain creature was in her eyes. Her lips made no concealment of its thoughts or its emotions, pure as the blue skies above them and as ungoverned by conventionality as the winds that shifted up and down the valleys. She was a new sort of being to him, a child-woman, a little wonder-nymph that had grown up with the flowers. And yet not so little after all. He had noticed that the top of her shining head came ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... lesson of Die Meistersinger. Down in Nuremberg they had standardized and conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing. Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion—not a rule, but a life—and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts of the people were stirred ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... very generally) was to reform the whole structure of opera, using the last or "Beethoven" development of instrumental music as a basis, and freeing it from the fetters which conventionality had imposed, in the shape of set forms, accepted arrangements, and traditional concessions to a style of singing now happily almost extinct. The one canon was to be dramatic fitness. In this "Art Work of the Future," as he called it, the interest of the drama is to depend not entirely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... always well-shaved; as neat as a billiard-ball. In the daytime, when he is partly porter, he wears a black tie, a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet, and, from waist to feet, a white apron like a skirt, and so competently encircling that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real necessity; but after six o'clock (becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel) he is clad as any other formal gentleman. At all times he wears a fresh table-cloth over his arm, keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at hand on a ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... came to the soul of the young musician we know not. But his genius thus directed knew no pause until it had won forever the freedom of the tonal art, until the last fetter of conventionality had been removed, until in all dignity and beauty music came forth, henceforth to comfort and solace the human heart. But of this anon. We trace the young boy to school; we see him a chorister in the choir of St. Michael's, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as having been carried on, on her part, according to her best knowledge of befitting dignity; but, unfortunately for her, the young American was of an outspoken disposition, and utterly untrammelled by those instincts of conventionality which Eliza had, not by training, but by inheritance from her law-abiding and custom-loving ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... morning of Fort Lamarie and Kit Carson, he had decided upon the career of a "scout," as being more accessible and requiring less water. Yet, out of compassion for Susy's possible ignorance, he said neither, and responded with the American boy's modest conventionality, "President." It was safe, required no embarrassing description, and had been approved by benevolent old gentlemen with ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... hard at first. Dr. Hubers did not rouse himself to more than the merest conventionality, and all the rest of it was left to his wife, who, however, rose to the situation with a superb graciousness. Finally they touched a topic which roused Karl. His mind reached out to it with his old ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... beings. Achievement proclaims ability to support, defend, bring credit and even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... discovered. He was in good circumstances, and always glad to receive us at his house, as this made him, virtually, the chief of our tribe, and the outlay for refreshments involved only the apples from his own orchard and water from his well. There was an entire absence of conventionality at our meetings, and this, compared with the somewhat stiff society of the village, was really an attraction. There was a mystic bond of union in our ideas: we discussed life, love, religion, and the future state, not only with the utmost candor, but with a warmth of feeling which, in ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another—the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... him was the slow daily influence of a large number of trifling habitual duties none of which fully strained his faculties, and the monotony of them, and the constant watchful conventionality of his deportment with customers. He was still a youth, very youthful, but you had to keep an eye open for his youthfulness if you wished to find it beneath the little man that he had been transformed into. He now took his watch out of his pocket with an absent ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... different nature of the two subjects, for one of Browning's most eminent qualities is his care in harmonising treatment with subject. King Victor and King Charles is a modern play, dealing with human nature under all the restrictions of a pervading conventionality and an oppressive statecraft. It deals, moreover, with complex and weakened emotions, with the petty and prosaic details of a secondary Western government. The Return of the Druses, on the other hand, treats of human nature in its most romantic conditions, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... our cynicism; their contented acquiescence in God's will rebukes our incessant restlessness; above all, their constant elevation shames that multitude of little vices, and little meannesses, which lie like a scurf over the conventionality of modern life. But this earlier chapter has also a special value for the young. It offers a picture which it would indeed be better for them and for us if they could be induced to study. If ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life. The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the terrible emotions that had swept over her life in the last three weeks, to be alone in the hills or by the sea. It seemed dreadful to be tied to her great house in the city, in her mourning, shut off suddenly from the world, and bound down by the chain of conventionality to a fixed method of existence. She would give anything to go away. Why not? She suddenly realised what was so hard to understand, that she was free to go where she pleased—if only, by accident, she could chance to meet Giovanni Saracinesca before ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... words. In a picture I would put it like this—a blue sky, a meadow of rank green grass, a stream full of forget-me-nots, and a girl bending over it, with eyes the color of the flowers. Conventionality would compel me to call it Spring or Youth!" He spoke fast and ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . . "puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . . prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with the life-purpose . . . with the end of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... eye is always on the object, and, though he represents it in his own style, that style is always normal and temperate, free from affectation, free from exaggeration or morbidity and, in the earlier periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is markedly different from that of prose, and there are ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... so ridiculous, under the direct charm of the fresh young voice that came down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends, this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the great, strong, Western sky. Everything should be perfect, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... "No; for conventionality's sake. Not legally, you understand. Not even an adventure as exciting as that has happened to me. But constructively in jail. De facto, as it were. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... grass and prickly-pear just at our feet. And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart. Here society is reduced to its original elements, the whole fabric of art and conventionality is struck rudely to pieces, and men find themselves suddenly brought back to the wants and resources of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... working from a few color sketches and many pencil studies, they painted the whole picture from first to last in the open air. Working in this way, certain qualities got into the pictures unavoidably. Necessarily the color was fresher and truer. Necessarily there was more breadth and frankness, and less conventionality and mere picture-making. The spirit of the open got onto the canvas, and the whole type of picture was changed. For the first time out-of-door values were studied as things in themselves interesting and important. The result on landscape pictures ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... night, for the first few hours, I was sublimely happy, and then a strange restlessness seized me. I was obsessed with a wish to see the flower-garden. For some minutes, stimulated by a dread of what my aunts would think of such a violation of conventionality on the part of a child, I combated furiously with the desire; but at length the longing was so great, so utterly and wholly irresistible, that I succumbed, and, getting quietly out of bed, made my way noiselessly into ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... and especially in the department of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled before the dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of a common form—a conventional stock of images, personages, and almost language—disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in the following of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniform conventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear his rue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinite diversity of circumstance and feeling ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... think about money again. He found that the larger the imaginary figures, the smaller shadow of discomfort clouded his thoughts. So he decided upon an act of princely generosity, as the result of which resolve peace returned and an unruffled mind. For the musty conventionality of his conclusion, it merely served as a peg upon which to hang thoughts not necessary ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... strong over others' weaknesses, weighing accurately the deeds and words of men and women, recognizing all there was in position and tradition, seeing with her father's clear eyes the practical meaning of any divergence from that conventionality which as a woman of the world she valued, she returned again and again to the trembling joy of that intoxicating moment. She though of her mother and sisters, of Raymond and Garnier, of Aladdin—she even forced herself to think ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... break out, with a greater show of indignation: 'I never heard of such extraordinary ideas for a girl to have, and such extraordinary things for a girl to talk about! My dear, you have acquired a freedom—you have emancipated yourself from conventionality—and I suppose I must congratulate you.' Laura only stood there, with her eyes fixed, without answering the sally, and Selina went on, with another change of tone: 'And pray if he was there, what is there so monstrous? Hasn't it happened that he is in London when I am there? ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the glitter of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with the coming dawn it will be on the march for the ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... some of the more conservative theologians continued to repeat the old arguments, and there were many who insisted upon the belief as absolutely necessary to ordinary orthodoxy; but it is evident that it had become a mere conventionality, that men only believed that they believed it, and now a reform seemed possible in the treatment ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... primitive wants and social interests in considerable variety. It is a never-failing source of supply of the strong waters that bring the good cheer of intoxication, and lull into torpid content the mind that wants to forget its worry or its misery. It is a place where conventionality is laid aside and human beings meet on the common level of convivial good-fellowship. It is the avenue to fuller enjoyment in billiard-room, at card-table, in dance-hall, and in house of assignation, but though the door is open to them there is no obligation to enter. It is ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Norman nature throughout, animating the whole, uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic. Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional,—not even the conventionality. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Prometheus the mythological, Manfred and Don Quixote the predecessors in modern literature. Also that Mephistopheles is as inexhaustible as a type of evil as Faust is as a type of virtue, and therefore that this picturesque stage devil, with all his conventionality, is akin to the serpent which tempted Eve, the Thersites of Homer, and—mirabile ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... he was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee's soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it. All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection. In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong. To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all woman-haters ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of scorn, the fine scorn for scent of every honest Backfisch, I rolled it up into a ball and flung it away into the bushes, where I daresay it is at this moment. "Away with you," I cried, "away with you, symbol of conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to a desire to please—away with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!" And so young had I grown within the last few minutes that I did not even ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... admitted the old man. "That combination of conventionality and naivete is very captivating. I notice it ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... The Heir at Law was accomplished in the New York season of 1890, with Joseph Jefferson in the character of Dr. Pangloss and William James Florence in that of Zekiel Homespun. That play dates back to 1797, a period in which a sedulous deference to conventionality prevailed in the British theatre, as to the treatment of domestic subjects; and, although the younger Colman wrote in a more flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... material. More might develop out of this love of form and drama in life. We have it to a certain degree of cultivation in picturesque and refined manners, dress, and ceremonial, but even there it is hampered through conventionality and want of invention; further evolved and extended into the deeper strata of life, it would lead to a more interesting and productive existence. Surely, if God is an artist as well as a judge, he will welcome into heaven not ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... requires that marriage take precedence of schooling," said Mrs. Sproul, as her mischievous old eyes snapped at Mrs. Cockrell's placid conventionality. "The correct order is for women to take husbands and then school children should be the inevitable outcome. They are not, however, in this day and generation, which is about to be ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... with Miss. Juno. He had followed her thither with what speed he dared. She had expected him; there was not breathing-space for conventionality between these two. In one part of the garden sat an artist at his easel; by his side a lady somewhat his senior, but of the type of face and figure that never really grows old, or looks it. She was embroidering flowers from nature, tinting them to the ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Arnold. He rose hastily, and leaning on a low wall which stood near, looked down at the bright little girl at his feet. "Fluff," he said, "should you greatly mind if I threw conventionality to the winds, ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... this remarkable passage in the history of the church, it is necessary to bear in mind the social conditions that prevailed. A population perfervido ingenio, of a temper peculiarly susceptible of intense excitement, transplanted into a wild country, under little control either of conventionality or law, deeply ingrained from many generations with the religious sentiment, but broken loose from the control of it and living consciously in reckless disregard of the law of God, is suddenly aroused to a ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... thawed Mrs. Grundy's very self. He was so vital with youth and vigor, and his flow of spirits so irresistible, that Miss Hargrove found her own nerves tingling with pleasure. The episode was novel, unexpected, and promised so much for the future, that in her delightful excitement she cast conventionality to the winds, and yielded to his sportive mood. They had not gone a mile together before one would have thought they had been acquainted for years. Burt's frank face was like the open page of a book, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... be strongly developed until the Bamberg period. We have seen how that early in life he conceived a decided antipathy to the prosaic and the commonplace, and his career up to this point furnishes abundant evidence that he hated with a genuine hatred to keep in the ruts of custom and conventionality, as if bound to do so because such was prescribed by custom and conventionality. His sentiments he never concealed, and his actions harmonised, almost without exception, strictly with his sentiments; for one of his most striking and instructive ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... that such questions may be thrust into the background, and consequently inhibited from presenting us with their full value and significance. And it is this which happens only too often in daily life. The constant need of attention to external things, the absorption of the mind in conventionality and custom as these present themselves in the form of a ready-made inheritance—all these occupy so much of the attention as to prevent man from knowing and experiencing what his own life is or what it is capable of becoming. Man has ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... no answer to that natural question. In spite of her reason, Flavia was chilled by the flat conventionality of Gerard's apparent attitude, as represented by those formal inquiries. Almost she would have preferred that he had not spoken of her at all; silence could not have ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... her equal in energy and beneficence, and I was younger when you came. But I feel for her longing to be up and doing, and her puzzled chafing against constraint and conventionality, though it breaks out ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whole life had been a protest against conventionality, and this impassioned denunciation came from a new world. The sound maddened Tatsu. He leaped to the veranda, now a mere ledge thrust out over darkness, threw an arm about the slender corner-post, and strained far out, gasping, into ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... impatient of conventionality. How was it possible for these people to look so quietly, eye to eye, upon the most vitally perfect of living beings? How could they turn from me to orange frappe or ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... how I should next present myself before her. In accordance with the usages of conventionality, it would be right for me to make an early call at Mrs Clyde's, in recognition of her late assembly; and, unless I should chance to meet Min out alone, I would have no chance of making my apology before then, while, even on that occasion, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the broad veranda stood a young man - plainly a professional, for while at a glance a girl might decide that Duncan Bennet was "up to date," still there was about him that disregard for conventionality that betokens high thinking, with no room for the consideration of trifling ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... appropriating Skippy was the reflex action on the Triumphant Egghead, it was absolutely necessary that Skippy should at least give the appearance of appreciating the privilege. Miss Mimi, therefore, decided to jump the fence of strict conventionality if the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... only keep from untwisting the morning-glory, only be willing to let the sunshine do it! Dickens said real children went out with powder and top-boots; and yet the children of Dickens's time were simple buds compared with the full-blown miracles of conventionality and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... together at work and play and on the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... washed, wrapped in clean linen cloths, and thus lowered into the earth. And this is as it should be. Why should the pomp and extravagance of man accompany him to his last resting-place? Were it not well if in this matter we abated something of our conventionality and ostentation? I do not mean to say that interments need be stripped of every thing like ornament; in all things the middle way is the safest. A simple funeral has surely in it more that awakes true religious feeling than the pomp and splendour which ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... after this do take my advice and live as others live. In a conventional world conventionality is the line of least resistance. Don't turn to the East unless the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... fell into quite a friendly and familiar groove, for Sara and Morva knew nothing of the restraints of class and conventionality. ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... alternations of tenderness and brusqueness, of devotion to her and devotion to his work, his constant offering of something new and his unremitting insistence upon something new from her each day make it impossible for her to develop the slightest tendency toward that sleeping sickness wherewith the germ of conventionality inflicts ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... unconscious of danger, filled me with profound sadness. And there was I, standing alone, seeing that sweet child flinging herself to ruin, and yet unable to prevent her, simply because I was bound hand and foot by the infernal restrictions of a miserable and a senseless conventionality. Dash it, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... familiar figure in the stalls, a fellow-student who sat there with mother and sister, black-uniformed, looking very much a gentleman. 'I, of course, am not a gentleman,' he said to himself, gloomily. Was there any chance that he might some day take his ease in that orthodox fashion? Inasmuch as it was conventionality, he scorned it; but the privileges which it represented had strong control of his imagination. That lady and her daughter would follow the play with intelligence. To exchange comments with them would be a keen delight. As for him—he had a shop-boy on one ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... see that conventionality and I are to be more two than ever henceforth, so I am going to yield up my ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... Down in Nuremberg they had standardized and conventionalized music. They had set it down in rules and men like Beckmesser could not imagine that there was any music permissible outside the regulations. Then came Walter von Stolzing. Music to him was not a conventionality but a passion—not a rule, but a life—and, when he sang, his melodies reached heights of beauty that Beckmesser's rules did not provide for. It was Walter von Stolzing who sang the Prize Song, and as the hearts ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... motley throng it was! Bohemia rubbing shoulders with orthodox conventionality. Duchesses, actors, artists, bishops, newspaper men out at elbows, deans, girl art students, spruce looking Eton boys in tall hats and short jackets, all eagerly pushing their way to the envied goal. A frantic endeavor it was, too. To tell the truth, few of the throng came to see the pictures; ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... twinkling everywhere. I could hear the ringing of some church bell; there was space, freedom for thought, a vague, uncertain prospect, out of which figures were looming curiously,—a delightful sense that I was sinning against conventionality ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... drawing his bow, is, for the time, wonderfully vivid and strong. All of these statues are evidence of the rapid progress which Greek sculpture was making in the fifth century against the demands of hieratic conventionality. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caress with every tenderness of speech and touch, and that, after all, the memorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere conventionality,—this is a dreadful fact on which the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it always seems a desolation never recognized, an anguish never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names upon the stones and the black head- boards,—the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... of the company. At the appointed hour no Julia appeared. In her stead, Mrs. Marrable portentously approached the stage, with an open letter in her hand. She was naturally a lady of the mildest good breeding: she was mistress of every bland conventionality in the English language—but disasters and dramatic influences combined, threw even this harmless matron off her balance at last. For the first time in her life Mrs. Marrable indulged in vehement gesture, and used strong language. She handed the letter sternly, at arms-length, to ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... insistence on a chaperone, which he had regarded a silly, outworn conventionality, appeared most wise. Germany was a poor place for ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Lord Torrington's tone suggested that this was a distinct advantage to Frank. "According to Miss Lentaigne then, the girl has asserted her right to live her own life untrammelled by the fetters of conventionality. That's the way she put ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... am I?" she replied. "A woman who has put herself outside the pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman's honor, why should you not sacrifice to me some of a man's honor? Do we not live outside the limits of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can part us—you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne, as my constancy and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an end. ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... his young guide, and disappeared down the stairs, sliding down the banisters. Young ladies in the best society do not often indulge in this amusement, but Mary Murphy knew little of etiquette or conventionality. ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... But then it was heroic in her to speak and smile at all when she was verily in torture. Nothing short of the worship due to the great god Society could have made her control herself so admirably; but Adelaide was a faithful worshiper of the divine life of conventionality, and she had her reward. Leam showed nothing, at least nothing directly overt. Perhaps her demeanor was stiller, her laconism curter, her distaste to uninteresting companionship and current small-talk more profound, than usual; but no one seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... Half the people who go to the Haverstocks don't wear evening dress on principle. That's their way of showing their contempt for conventionality. I suppose you'll come with me?" John nodded his head. "Good! We'll start off immediately after we've had our dinner. You'll get a good dose of Truth to-night, my son. There was a couple went there once ... the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... however strongly they exerted themselves to throw off the shackles of conventionality in sculpture, painting, and architecture, yet yielded to the traditional force of the symbolical pattern, and accepted most of the Oriental forms, merely remodelling them for their own use, and adding to their significance what their ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... remarkable family. They had strong characters and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport, and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's office, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the exact motion, and tread in the precise footprints in which every one else speaks, moves, walks, was the only evidence of honesty. What is a man's individuality worth, if it is to be trodden out in the treadmill tramp of senseless conventionality?" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... I didn't quite understand," he said in a new tone which she had not heard before. Mr. Balm of Gilead, alias Peter Pan, had suddenly grown up, and as Peter Rolls, Jr., was all politeness and conventionality. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... and bitter attacks. That he might obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and scoffer at all tradition and all conventionality. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... People do not mince along the banks of streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise with ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott—she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly. ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... presenting the fresh-coloured, discreetly-smiling vision called 'the typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... of Bertram's nonsensical talk with Kate a little while ago, and she's ready to cast the last ravelling of white satin and conventionality behind her, and go with you to the ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... inclined to argue and dispute about it. The base, the impure desire is only the imperfect desire; if it is gratified, it reveals its imperfections, and the soul knows that not there can it stay; but it must have faced and tested everything. If the soul, out of timidity and conventionality, says 'No' to its eager impulses, it halts upon its pilgrimage. Some of the most grievous and shameful lives on earth have been fruitful enough in reality. The reason why we mourn and despond over them is, again, that we limit our hope to the single life. There is time for everything; ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pelted with the eggs of the last twenty years' 'singing birds' as a disorderly woman and freethinking poet! People have been so kind that, in the first place, I really come to modify my opinions somewhat upon their conventionality, to see the progress made in freedom of thought. Think of quite decent women taking the part of the book in a sort of effervescence which I hear of with astonishment. In fact, there has been an enormous quantity of extravagance ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... step; even the shops have a Bohemian aspect, for trade is nowhere so much the victim of chance as here. You see no breach of the public peace, no indecorous act offends you; but the people you meet have a certain air of independence, of scorn, of conventionality, a certain carelessness which mark them as very different from the throng you have just left on Broadway. They puzzle you, and set you to conjecturing who they are and what they are, and you find yourself weaving a romance about nearly every man ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies. Our finite nature, the power of tradition and conventionality, as well as our hereditary instincts, restrict the scope of our capacity for artistic enjoyment. Our very individuality establishes in one sense a limit to our understanding; and our aesthetic personality seeks its own affinities ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... grotesqueness in choice of subject and in treatment, which seems to result chiefly from his wish to portray the world as it actually is, keeping in close touch with genuine everyday reality; partly also from his instinct to break away from placid and fiberless conventionality. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sentiment, "To Hell with the Pope!" taking out a licence, and charge him a small fee. Positive treason, such as the proclamation of Provisional Governments, would of course pay a higher rate. All these would be most interesting experiments, and would add a picturesque touch to the conventionality of modern administration. But if we were to overtax sugar or coffee, corn or butter, flax or wool, beer or spirits, land or houses, I fear that we should be beating ourselves rather severely with our own sticks. Our revenge on "Ulster" would ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... room for any other thought than of her. And yet his happiness was tampered by a thing which, if not grief, depressed and saddened him at times. Two days more and they would be at Fort o' God, and there Jeanne would be no longer his own, as she was now. Even the wilderness has its conventionality, and at Fort o' God their comradeship would end. A day of rest, two at the most, and he would leave for the camp on Blind Indian Lake. As the time drew nearer when they would be but friends and no longer ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... paintings mentioned by Pliny were commonly believed to be earlier than the foundation of Rome. At the present day the tombs of Etruria afford examples of Etruscan painting in every stage of its development, from the rudeness and conventionality of early art in the tomb of Veii to the correctness and ease of design, and the more perfect development of the art exhibited in the painted scenes in the tombs of Tarquinii. In one of these tombs the pilasters are profusely adorned ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... relations in some degree consoled her for the disappointment of womanly aspirations by a feeling of distinction. She was not like other women: her lot was set apart and peculiar. She looked down upon her sex. The conventionality of women's lives renders their vanity peculiarly susceptible to a suggestion that their destiny is in any respect unique, —a fact that has served the turn of many a seducer before now. To-day, after returning from his drive with Miss Rood, Mr. Morgan had walked ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Ingres hated academic conventionality; he mingled the Florentine and Greek schools; he sought the ideal not outside of reality but in its very essence, in the reconciliation of style with nature. Color he considered of secondary importance; he not only subordinated it voluntarily to drawing, but he did not have a natural ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Byronism was over, and polite England was already settling down to the conventionalities of the Early Victorian period. The romantic school was passing away, and the new generation was turning from it to seek reality in physical science. But deep below the conventionality and the utilitarianism alike there remained from the Revolution its legacy of lawlessness, and many were more intent on adventure ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... modification of architectural style; but the conservative instincts of the people discouraged any deviation from the conventional shapes of the temples, which appear indeed to have been firmly established long before the days of Hammurabi. The influence of conventionality finds a striking illustration in the manner in which the temples of Assyria follow Babylonian models. Soft and hard stone suitable for permanent structures was easily procured in the mountainous district adjacent to Assyria. The Assyrians used this material for statues, ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... even fame to the object of future choice, and no good point is lost. Physical force and skill, and above all, victory and glory, make a hero and invest him with a romantic glamour, which, even though concealed by conventionality or etiquette, is profoundly felt and makes the winner more or less irresistible. The applause of men and of mates is sweet and even intoxicating, but that of ladies is ravishing. By universal acclaim the fair belong to the brave, strong, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of Daniel Randon's house Lee sat pondering over his brother's emphatic disconnected sentences. "This conventionality, that you have been so severe with, is exceedingly useful. It's not too much to say indispensable. Under its cover a certain limited freedom is occasionally possible. And where women are concerned—" he evidently didn't think it necessary even ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... when he is just about to fling himself down an Alpine precipice that his wife and Octave may have their way undisturbed. And all the time, what poetry and passion in the presentation of these things! Beside them the mere remembrance of English ignorance, prudishness, and conventionality would set the lad swelling, as he read, with a sense of superior scorn, and of wild sympathy for a world in which love and not law, truth and not legal fiction, were masters ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remains unanswered because its pray-ers never do anything to fulfil their prayers. I do not say they are hypocrites; certainly they are not consciously so, but I do say that there is a large measure of conventionality that means nothing, in the prayers of average Christian people for more holiness and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... me for a moment throw conventionality aside; will you for that brief space of time let me speak truly and freely to you, as one might speak who has passed the ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... impossible, and the sharpness of the pony's back, riding with no saddle equally so. There was no alternative: I must either turn back, or mount as a man. Necessity gives courage in emergencies. I determined therefore to throw aside conventionality, and do in 'Iceland as the Icelanders do.' Keeping my brother at my side, and bidding the rest ride forward, I made him shorten the stirrups, and hold the saddle, and after sundry attempts succeeded in landing ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... he knew her to be, he hesitated whether he should call her by her given name, and was taken aback when she smilingly thanked him for doing so, with the assurance that she was often bored with the eternal conventionality of people in ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... chance in traveling around the country to study the free types and life of the West. Being very impressionable, he imbibed a great deal which he has turned to good account in his chosen work. At fourteen he started to carve figures from the chalk that conventionality required to be used on blackboard problems. At eighteen he entered the Chicago Art Institute, where he stayed for but three months. He soon went to Paris, going first to the Beaux Arts and later to the Colorossi and Julian Academies. ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... up quickly. The traditional formality and conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... I first had in my student-days," replied Fiddyes. "Conventionality, not to say a most proper and becoming reverence, prevents people by no means ignorant from considering the point. But once think upon it, and you at least, of all men, must at once perceive how utterly impossible it would be for a victim nailed upon a cross by hands and feet to preserve ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and appliances to compass a selfish or sordid end. On these occasions, as may well be imagined, many curious incidents occurred. Lincoln was usually clad "in a black broadcloth suit, nothing in his dress betokening disregard of conventionality, save perhaps his neat cloth slippers, which were doubtless worn for comfort. He was seated beside a plain cloth-covered table, in a commodious arm-chair." As each visitor approached the President he was greeted with an encouraging nod and smile, and a few moments ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... to be a whole one and might have made good, although the old man has not much use for art. Unfortunately, however, I felt I had to kick against the conventionality of the life I led and the protest I put up was a little too vigorous. It made trouble, and in consequence, my folks decided I'd better be an engineer. I couldn't follow their arguments, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... possibilities. She is more than pretty, she is talented and she possesses character in a marked degree that sets her aside from the rest. It is this difference, this broadness of view, perhaps a certain intolerance of conventionality, that make me feel that, much as it has done for her, and that has been largely due to her own endeavors, this school, or any school, is not the place for ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... I believed with you. Nature is higher than man, and no power on earth can prove it otherwise." He looked into the softest of brown eyes, and his voice trembled. "Beside you the world is nothing. Its approval or its condemnation are things to be laughed at. With you I challenge conventionality—society—everything." He bent over her hand almost reverently and touched it ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... work this out myself, and surely I should meet officers at the ball who would gladly present me to the lady. I should be compelled to attend in field uniform, yet circumstances would excuse that, and what little I had seen of her convinced me she was no stickler for conventionality. The duty soldier was more apt to interest such a personality than any dandy on dress parade. With a word I dismissed my companion, and turned in to the camp of the Yagers, sure of a welcome at their mess-table, and a chance to ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... credited as true reflections of their prototypes. Some were wilfully false, no doubt; many more so by unavoidable accident and want of skill. Somerset felt that it required a profounder mind than his to disinter from the lumber of conventionality the lineaments that really sat in the painter's presence, and to discover their history behind the curtain ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings against the bars ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... speedily as possible. Snow can lodge on the top of a dome, not on the ridge of a gable. And thus, as far as roofing is concerned, the gable is a far more essential feature of Northern architecture than the pointed vault, for the one is a thorough necessity, the other often a graceful conventionality: the gable occurs in the timber roof of every dwelling-house and every cottage, but not the vault; and the gable built on a polygonal or circular plan, is the origin of the turret and spire;[69] and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... very inconveniently across Christina's principles; yet she was afraid of saying too much. She reflected that her friend was breathing the soft air of luxury, which is not strengthening, and enveloped in a kind of mist of conventionality, through which she could not see. With herself it was different. She had been thrown out of all that; forced to do battle with necessity and difficulty, and so driven to lay hold of the one hand of strength and deliverance ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... long arms." He recalled this saying of the Siberian priests and the mad Cossack answer: "Therefore let us ride fast!" The swaying of the yacht was like the rhythmic motion of his Arab through the long grass beyond the Dnieper, in that wild land where conventionality and ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... bourgeois to countess, from cure to Parisian boulevardier, till the entire side of the table was in a buzz of talk. These genial people of a genial land finding themselves all in search of the same adventure, on top of a hill, away from the petty world of conventionality, remembered that speech was given to man to communicate with his fellows. And though neighbors for a brief hour, how charming such an hour can be made when into it are crowded the effervescence of personal experience, the witty exchange of comment and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... gamblers and disreputable women, who conduct themselves with appropriate freedom from the restraints of conventionality. FERNANDE, who is too lachrymose to be a cheerful feature, is wisely placed on guard at the outer door. The company proceed to play at faro, the bank being the loser. There is a false alarm of police, and the game is suddenly stopped. The Banker, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... her very miserable, and she looked about for her mother; but Mrs. Henchard, who had less idea of conventionality than Elizabeth herself, had gone away, leaving her daughter to return at her own pleasure. The latter moved on into the dark dense old avenues, or rather vaults of living woodwork, which ran along the town boundary, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... occur to the woman who is about to become a mother. Most of these questions are reasonable and natural, and should be frankly answered; but a false conventionality has—until recently, at least—forbidden any open discussion of facts connected with childbirth. The inevitable result has been that, without experience of their own to guide them, prospective mothers have sought advice from ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... stretched to a long quarter of an hour before she descended. To the outward eye at least Miss Whitford looked a woman of the world, sheathed in a plate armor of conventionality. As soon as his eyes fell on her Clay knew that this pale, slim girl in the close-fitting gown was a stranger to him. Her eyes, star-bright and burning like live coals, warned him that the friend whose youth ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... another, and we try to be he. The attempt is always a failure. The worst of it is that in our effort to be another we have ceased to be ourselves, and after such a loss what do we still possess? Perhaps the disaster comes in another way. Conventionality has certain curious notions about the pulpit, the fulfilment of which it paradoxically despises as it demands it. The preacher is expected to speak in a different voice and wear a different expression in the "sacred desk" from ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... pompous sense always. He sees life in only one facet. Your lover sees its many sides, its infinite variety. He can laugh and weep; his imagination lights up dry facts with whimsical fancies; he dives through the crust of conventionality to the realities of life. 'Tis the lover keeps this old world young. The fire of youth, of eternal laughing youth, runs flaming through his blood. His days ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... sustained lofty feeling that seem to mark it the typical French symphony of its time. The strength of the work lies in a unity that is not merely of figure and outline. If we must measure a symphony mainly by the slow movement, we cannot avoid, with all the languorous beauty, a certain conventionality of mood, stressed with an exotic use of the appoggiatura, while in the Scherzo is a refined savagery of ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... a limitation in the use of certain methods of war, and a total renunciation of the use of others.... If in the following work the expression "the law of war" is used, it must be understood that by it is meant only ... a limitation of arbitrary behaviour which custom and conventionality, human friendliness and a calculating egoism have erected, but for the observance of which there exists no express sanction, but only "the fear of reprisals" ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... part may be readily imagined; but it was invariably characterized by an element of refined restraint, and, whether from some implied understanding or individual sense of honour, it never passed the bounds of conventionality or a certain delicacy of respect. The delivery was consequently more or less protracted, but when each man had exchanged his three or four minutes' conversation with the fair postmistress,—a conversation ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... prejudices, attitudes, we take on through imitation. The tendency to imitate others coupled with the desire to be thought well of by others is one of the most powerful factors in producing conformity. They are the whips which keep us within the bounds of custom and conventionality. The tendency to imitate is so strong that its results are almost as certain as are those of inherited tendencies. It is almost as certain that a child will be like his parents in speech, manners, customs, ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... love, games, gayety, and flirtation. There is no such social freedom to be enjoyed anywhere as on board an ocean steamer. The breaking-up of old associations, the opening of a fresh existence, the necessity of new relationships,—this fuses the crust of conventionality, quickens the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and astonished to find in ourselves so much wit, eloquence, and fine ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... always picturesque, and in the presence of Englishmen he had a habit of accentuating those characteristics of speech and manner which are held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... give the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart, not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But poor ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new school in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions, literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter; but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing stateliness, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... habits than I was. He was engaged to a young lady all the time I was with him, and wrote letters to her constantly; but this fact did not prevent him from paying attentions to other young women, and I was aware that he was more familiar with them than conventionality would warrant. In fact he made no attempt to be secret in the matter, and often poked fun at me for my over sensitivity on the subject. Here was the key to a whole lot of meaning. The first year I was with him, I had no sweetheart or any lady friend on whom to center my affection ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Camarilla are overbearing to the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy to the provincial nobility, and the provincial nobility to the inferior classes. As I said before, it is a sliding-scale of despotism. The worst feature of it is seen in the treatment of women. Among the better classes conventionality has, doubtless, somewhat meliorated their condition. Absolute physical cruelty would be, perhaps, a violation of etiquette and good breeding; but neglect, selfishness, innate coarseness of thought, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... lady, "has as little conventionality about it as had yours. The magnitude of the danger which prompted yours must also excuse mine; I am come to repay the debt ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... seem to have been the first to break down this barrier and establish more friendly relations with his classes. He was naturally well adapted to this. Perfectly frank and fearless in his dealings with all men, he hated unnecessary conventionality, and at the same time possessed the rare art of preserving his dignity while associating with his subordinates on friendly terms. Always kindly and even sympathetic to the worst scapegraces in the division, he could assert ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... city,—gaining new experience with every hour, and studying the needs and complaints of his people for himself;—but if we should be told of a modern monarch doing likewise in our own day, we should mount on the stiff hobby-horse of our ridiculous conventionality, and accuse him of having brought the dignity of the Throne into contempt. Yet nothing perhaps can be more contemptible than a monarch who is too surrounded by flunkeyism to be a Man,—and, on the other hand, nothing could ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... two ripened fast. In defiance of all conventionality, the lady took to sitting out late at night with her elderly admirer, and, with an absolute disregard of decorum, accompanied him on long excursions. Finally, she went away with him altogether. On the occasion ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... Barrington had flung off the bonds of conventionality. "Lance," she said, "you have proved your right to stay at Silverdale, and would not what you are doing now cover a great deal in ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... they would do things up in shape somehow," grunted the Bishop's son approvingly. "This is the stuff. Conventionality be tabooed. They're going to the other extreme, and that's the way to do. If you don't want an altar and candles, and a high-mucky-muck at the organ, have a hay-wagon. Gee!—Let me get up here next to Ben Hur and ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... second instant of his observation was that Sally was not at all loath to waste her time on the stranger. She was eating with a truly formidable conventionality of manner, and a certain grace with which she raised the ponderous coffee cup, made of crockery guaranteed to resist all falls, struck awe through the heart of the cowpuncher. She was bent on another conquest, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... exclaimed Dennis impulsively; then, with a realization of the thin surface over which he was making such rapid strides despite the danger signals of conventionality, and with a diplomacy born of his native good sense, he glided, with cheerful Celtic sagacity, to safer footing by asking abruptly: "May I recommend myself"—as if he had not already done ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... had carried conventionality further than anyone, and that consequently they see a great merit in the return to realism. In the fact of not lying they ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... shut up," said the dragon severely. "Believe me, St. George," he went on, "there's nobody in the world I'd sooner oblige than you and this young gentleman here. But the whole thing's nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There's absolutely nothing to fight about, from beginning to end. And anyhow I'm not going to, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... a speech in the House of Commons, however forcible and eloquent, rarely influences a vote. Some orators, however, have gift of stirring the soul to emotions that carry a man to actions beyond range of conventionality. Such an one is the Right Hon. THOMAS LOUGH, commonly and affectionately known through several Parliaments as "Tommy." One of small faction of Liberals who have not withdrawn opposition to Military Service Bill. Declaiming against it just now on motion for Second ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... rushed into talk with Eagle before we stopped shaking hands; but he had not been able to answer the call of conventionality so soon; and it was not till after we were seated at table that he could control himself to speak. On his other side was Prince Paul's elderly dinner companion. On my other side was the new military attache ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... fault, my fault, every bit of it," he muttered, still staring straight ahead. "If I hadn't been so thoughtless—As if I could imprison that bright spirit of youth in a great dull cage of conventionality, and not expect it to bruise its wings by fluttering ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... discloses fitfully on this side and that. None of these things are to be found in The Ring and the Book The action of Caponsacchi, though noble and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, no deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, no voluntary submission to a lifelong ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... which have taken their place among ecclesiastical soporifics. Besides, he has recently compiled a collection of the world's best hymns into the "Standard Hymnal." In this field Converse, though conventional,—and conventionality may be considered inevitable here,—is mellow of harmony and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... glared at me when I said something about good manners. Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... strongly marked as he could; to each scale or leaf he gave a raised edge to mark its contour and distinguish it from the rest. The general effect was thus obtained by deliberate exaggeration of the relief and by a conventionality that was justified by the conditions of the problem ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... I am quite all right," she said, in answer to a question. "I shall not even have a suspicion of a limp." She held out her hand to me, and did not try to draw it away, though I grasped it rather longer and more tightly than conventionality might have approved. "You will come—soon—to see Lady Tressidy and—me?" ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... said to have been regal and dignified, to have worked hard, to have written correct state papers, and to have been capable of the deportment of an educated Christian gentleman, but to have reimbursed himself for this subservience to conventionality by occasionally retiring to an undignified residence on the sea-shore, where he transformed himself into the likeness of one of his half-clad heathen ancestors, debased himself by whisky, and revelled in ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "Love must be wild and uncontrolled to save it from banalite. It must be a summer thunderstorm; the heavy brooding of the clouds of thought, the lightning of desire, then the crash, the downpour,—and the end, in which the bland sun smiles upon a bland world of dull but wholesome routine and tame conventionality, making believe that there never was such a thing known as the past storm! Be consoled, Denzil, and trust me,—you shall have time to make your honorable proposal, and Madame had better accept you,—for your love ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... engagements outside of certain disreputable establishments, where a genial personality or an over-burdened pocketbook gives entree, and the rules of conventionality have never even been whispered. His love affairs, confined to this class of women, have seldom lasted more than a week or ten days. His editors know him as a brilliant genius, irresponsible, unreliable, ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... has come. Truth, independent of doctrines and time-honored systems, knocks at the vi:15 portal of humanity. Contentment with the past and the cold conventionality of materialism are crumbling away. Ignorance of God is no longer the stepping- vi:18 stone to faith. The only guarantee of obedience is a right apprehension of Him whom to know aright is Life eternal. Though empires fall, "the Lord shall vi:21 ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... to a new service—a service of self-renunciation and patient labour, undertaken—yes, I dare to say it—for the welfare of the large sisterhood of waiting and working women. A servant? No, a soldier; for I should be one among the vanguard, who strive to make a breach in the great fortress of conventionality. Not that I feared the word service, considering what Divine lips had said on that subject—"I am among you as one who serveth—" but I knew how the world shrank ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... the prince of portrait painters. Titian paints nobler pictures, and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper; arid when you consider that, with a frightful conventionality of social habitude all around him, he yet conceived the simplest types of all feminine and childish loveliness;—that in a northern climate, and with gray, and white, and black, as the principal colours around him, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
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