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More "Insincere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rose and her mother. The most subtle and amazingly high motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton's most ordinary actions, and happily he had been so ordinary a person that no impossible shock had been given to the ideal built up about him. And it had not been difficult or insincere to carry on something of the same illusion with regard to the man who had won the Victoria Cross and had been very popular with Tommy Atkins. David Bright's very reserves, the closed doors in his domestic life, did not prevent, and indeed in some ways helped, the process. The mother had ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... always remember in connection with blessing that the deep heart-feeling is the primary thought. "Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy Name." The praise of the lip may be insincere; the blessing of the heart ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... up. For the moment she was puzzled. To her, Hugo's speech sounded insincere. But the glance of the eye that she encountered was so caressing, the curves of his mouth were so sweetly infantine, that she accused herself of harsh judgment, and remembered Hugo's foreign blood and Continental training, which had given him the habit, she supposed, of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Wolsey's foresight in 1528, when he told Campeggio that the Emperor would not wage war over the divorce of Catherine, and said there would be a thousand ways of keeping on good terms with him (Ehses, Roemische Dokumente, p. 69; L. and P., iv., 4881). Dr. Gairdner thinks Wolsey was insincere in this remark (English Hist. Rev., xii., 242), but he seems to have gauged Charles V.'s ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... ideally right in it. He wondered whether in the future he would often be there, whether Lady Sellingworth would allow him to be one of the few real intimates to whom her door was open. He hoped so; he believed so; but he was not quite certain about it. For there was something elusive about her, not insincere but just that—elusive. She might not care to see very much of him although he knew that she liked him. They had touched the fringe of intimacy on the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... contemptible. He had always until now accepted this idea and found it confirmed on every side. His six years at Rugby had encouraged him—he had despised, with his tolerant smile, boys and masters alike; all insincere, all weak, all to be used, if he wanted them, as he chose to use them. He had thought often of the lonely knight—that indeed should be his attitude ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... of good books in every department, and the enormous quantity of imperfect, insincere books, has been the lament of all times. The complaint being as old as Literature itself, we may dismiss without notice all the accusations which throw the burden on systems of education, conditions of society, cheap books, levity and superficialty of readers, and analogous causes. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... denied something which has proved the secret of Colonial loyalty and prosperity, what Englishman would be so short-sighted as to wish to deprive her of it for the mere sake of domination? If Home Rule were really a stepping-stone towards Imperial Federation, how insincere our professions of "thinking Imperially," if we are not prepared to sacrifice a merely local sentiment of union ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... CRUELTIES, without the denunciation of the public and the profession that their wickedness deserves."[1] And that vivisector of to-day, who suggests that if anaesthetics had been known to Magendie or Brachet, they would invariably have been used, is either ignorant or insincere. Surely he must know that the very nature of their experiments precluded the use of ether, and that in their time, as to-day, if the experiment were to be tried at all, it was necessary ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... place. I tried every way I could think of, to overcome their objections, but to no purpose. They have so little regard for truth, that one cannot rely much on what they say: I begin to think that it is all owing to the Tapan Gam, who I suspected was insincere in ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... a benefactor of the human race; he would have been insincere if he had pretended otherwise; he finished his first paper with these words: "I shall endeavor still farther to prosecute this enquiry, an enquiry, I trust, not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... space to look about her; all the better if she could form various acquaintances. On that account he urged so strongly that she should be brought into relation with Miss Lant, and, if possible, with certain of Miss Lant's friends. All very well, had not the reasoning been utterly insincere. It might have applied to another person; in Jane's case it was mere sophistry. Her nature was home-keeping; to force her into alliance with conscious philanthropists was to set her in the falsest position conceivable; striving to mould herself to ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... of the extravagant terms of friendship which fell from the Tarjum's lips, I was convinced, by studying the man's face, that his words were insincere, and that it would be unsafe to trust him. He never looked us straight in the face. His eyes were fixed on the ground all the time, and he spoke in an unpleasantly affected manner. I did not like the man from the very ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... Van Buren received a majority of the votes on the first ballot, and it was not unnaturally charged that many of those supporting him must have been insincere, inasmuch as they had the full right, until self-restrained by the two-thirds rule, to declare him the nominee. But this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Mr. Van Buren had been nominated in the National Democratic Conventions of 1835 and 1839 with the two-thirds rule ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... remained transfixed at the sight, and to have noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity of his hearers alone prevented them ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... affectation," said Grace, shaking her head. "It is no use—you love him. I can see in your face that in this matter of my husband you have not let your acts belie your feelings. During these last four or six months you have been terribly indiscreet; but you have not been insincere, and ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Maker, obliged him to speak truth on all occasions, and not to relinquish, by a base denial, the holy doctrine which the Supreme Being had revealed to mankind: that there was one miscarriage in his life, of which, above all others, he severely repented; the insincere declaration of faith, to which he had the weakness to consent, and which the fear of death alone had extorted from him: that he took this opportunity of atoning for his error, by a sincere and open ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... has inflamed the military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the centre of the situation. "In many ways," he says, "military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infinitely ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... was fear in Rogers' eyes, too—a mere glimmer of it. Yet it was there; and when Deveny set his glass down and looked straight at Rogers, it was that fear which brought the fawning, insincere smirk ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of sentiments it is better to look to the nature of things than to the humors of men. The very attempt towards pleasing everybody discovers a temper always flashy, and often false and insincere. Therefore, as I have proceeded straight onward in my conduct, so I will proceed in my account of those parts of it which have been most excepted to. But I must first beg leave just to hint to you that we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a man's politeness is usually more helpful and a woman's more caressing. This distinction is natural, not artificial. A man seeks to serve, a woman seeks to please. Hence a woman's politeness is less insincere than ours, whatever we may think of her character; for she is only acting upon a fundamental instinct; but when a man professes to put my interests before his own, I detect the falsehood, however disguised. Hence it is easy for women to be polite, and easy to teach little girls politeness. The ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... consistent with all this—even setting apart the fact that he was perfectly well known to be only a poor miner—that he should lie again. Like most logical reasoners Mr. Ford forgot that humanity might be illogical and inconsistent without being insincere. He turned away without speaking as if indicating a ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... her career was a succession of brilliant coups in gaining the confidence and love, not to say the money, of men of all ages, and all walks of life. Her powers of fascination were as potent as her professions of reform were insincere. She never made an honest effort to be an honest woman, she never tried to do the square thing. Yet, like other women of her type, she found all sorts of excuses for her wrongdoing. She pretended that she was persecuted, a victim of circumstances, and was ever ready to ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... government to set on foot negotiations for peace, and a growing party in Holland were beginning to clamour for the cessation of a war which was crippling their trade and draining the resources of the country, the prince was resolutely opposed to the English offer of mediation, which he regarded as insincere and premature. He was well aware that there was in England a very strong and widespread opposition to the succession of James Duke of York, who made no secret of his devoted attachment to the Roman Catholic faith. So strong was the feeling ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... not accept and be done with it, instead of persisting in a sequence of insincere and even lying ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... treachery had he been moved to all this, if he really loved another? That he was simply amusing himself with the sort of flirtation she herself could take up as a mere pastime was not to be believed. That the worshipper should be insincere in his worship was too dreadful to think of. And yet it was to this very man she had once turned to avenge herself on Walpole's treatment of her; she had even said, 'Could you not make a quarrel with him?' Now, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... promote so-called labor interests by lawless violence and dynamite. The bonds of society will be loosed if we do. I would not for a moment be thought to say that those who are in favor of more democracy, through the initiative and referendum, are factionalists, and insincere in their view that that system will work a good result in the fight against corruption in politics. I only think that they are idealists in this matter, and don't fully understand the practical operation of the system ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... cast on Duerer's consistency; for, had these designs the significance read into them, he must be supposed an altogether convinced enemy of the Church; and the tremendous salaams which he afterwards made to her in far more important works ought, to logical minds, to appear horribly insincere. ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the strongest necessity, and the most ample evidence, would ever have drawn this condemnation from Rome, whether sincere or insincere. But the urgencies of the case became more evident from day to day. In 1758, the condemnation was followed by the practical measure of appointing Cardinal Saldanha visitor and reformer of the Jesuits in Portugal, and the Portuguese settlements ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... now you are happy, with a brilliant suite Of bowing slaves and insincere gallants; Go where you will, you see them at your feet; A bed of perfumed posies ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... make the tragedy insincere? I think not. We know that people did feel and think about "pollution" in the way which Sophocles represents; and if they so felt, then the tragedy ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... not watched he will get himself photographed in it, too. When I see the Lord Mayor's footman I am dissatisfied with my lot. Yes, our clothes are a lie, and have been nothing short of that these hundred years. They are insincere, they are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor — unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose — may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose judgments ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... ridicule from all manner of men. His dust lies under the Edgware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour; and his memory is—Nay what matters what his memory is? His memory, at bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god: a terror and horror to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons; an everlasting encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to all the brave. It is the natural course and history of the Godlike, in every place, in every time. What god ever ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... war we are likely to witness an art evolution which will not be restricted to statues and pictures and insincere essays in dry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate the whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of a younger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again make their dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and the Formless will ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... thing to say, I think," returned Miss Starbrow quickly. "It is not my custom to be insincere." And then her sincerity almost compelled her to add, "But about your late husband I have said too much." For that was what she felt, and it vexed her soul to have to utter ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... conventions; they cannot even express admiration in fitting language; they may giggle or cackle so that every ripple of laughter and every turn of a phrase sounds nauseously insincere. Marion Dearsley durst not talk frankly with this fine ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... feminine tactics, which are emphasized by insincere gestures, by looks of feigned ingenuousness, by artful intonations of the voice and even by the snare of cunning silence, are characteristic to some ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... lying; and, whereas they are innumerable, he will point out [at least] the sources and the general heads of these mischiefs and calamities, viz. 1. How great is God's displeasure and how great His hatred of a man who is insincere and a liar. 2. What little security there is that a man who is specially hated by God may not be visited by the heaviest punishments. 3. What more unclean and foul, as St. James says, than ... that a fountain ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... things—to contemn the Jew and accept the symphony as a manifestation of tremendous genius. Possibly Mendelssohn never clapped eyes on the symphony. Had he done so, one would have expected him to pay Wagner a superficial, insincere compliment about the score, and imply that something might be done, etc. We have Richard's written word for it that Mendelssohn never referred to Wagner's work. All the same, what I believe may have been the case, and what Wagner most certainly ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... silence. He thought the Church insincere, a put-up job, but that dissenters were worse. They should all be abolished, with other shams. For a short time at Oxford he had given the Church a trial, even felt real admiration for it, under ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men vied with each other in their enthusiasm and prayers for his success, much as though they were sending off the dictator Caesar or the emperor Augustus. Their motive was neither fear nor affection, but a sheer passion for servility. One can see the same in households of slaves, where each ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... silence, or misleading speech. The fact that syphilis is a disease spread to a considerable extent by sexual relations too often forces us into an attitude of veiled insinuation about it, a mistaken delicacy which easily becomes prudish and insincere. It is a direct move in favor of vulgar thinking to misname anything which involves the intimacies of life, or to do other than look it squarely in the eye, when necessity demands, without shuffling or equivocation. On this principle it is worth while to meet the problem ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... said at last. 'People tell you the French are insincere. Now, I think your sincerity is beautiful. I think you have a noble character. I admire you very much. I am very grateful for your kindness to—to one so young,' and he ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... true, hold so much converse on the fashions—or be a means of inventing, or especially of retailing, so much petty scandal—as in some other situation, or in other circumstances. Still, the society of home will be better and more truly refined, than if it were more hollow, and affected, and insincere—in other words, made up of more fashionable materials. If to be fashionable is to distort nature as much as possible—and if the most fashionable society is that which is thus distorted in the highest degree—then it must be admitted ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Supreme Court judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... practise oral composition at the age of eighteen months, and at the age of three was able to use complex sentences with freedom and skill. In the upper classes the composition is too often as mechanical, as unreal, and as insincere as in the lower. Sometimes a given subject is worked out by the teacher with the class, the children, one by one, suggesting sentences, which are shaped and corrected by the teacher and then written up ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... acrid sub-flavor of irony and insincerity with which an insincere woman can not help tainting even ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... tribes confederated under Pontiac's masterly leadership, then Dunmore's War permitted us to begin life as a republic without having the Alleghanies for our western boundary. Nor can I hold in these latter days that His Lordship was insincere in waging the war; for England was against it ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... is exquisite. They are found in the first canto. This scene wherein the Princess refuses to wed Calendau is typical of the poet. The northern temperament is not impressed with these long tirades, full of ejaculations and apostrophes; they are apt to seem unnatural, insincere, and theatrical. Intense feeling is not so verbose in the north. In this particular Mistral is true to his race. We quote entire the words of Calendau after the refusal of Esterello, itself full exclamation ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... of hearing about it from me; and besides—" She detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for absolute ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... clergy were drunken also, but not half so bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambition; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half so bad as the laity. The laity, and you working men especially, are the dupes of frothy, insincere, official rant, as Mr. Carlyle would call it, in Parliament, on the hustings, at every debating society and Chartist meeting; and, therefore, the clergyman's sermons are apt to be just what people like elsewhere, and what, therefore, they ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... gives from scanty stores. 'Deep poverty' is no excuse for not giving, and will be no hindrance to a willing heart. 'I cannot afford it' is sometimes a genuine valid reason, but oftener an insincere plea. Why are subscriptions for religious purposes the first expenditure to be reduced ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... left the quiet halls of Oxford for the frivolous court of Queen Elizabeth, there was more than one heart that was anxious for him. The Irish Sea lay between him and his sober, upright father; while the voluptuous and insincere Earl of Leicester was to be his patron, and all the hollow, glittering, pleasure-loving men and women of the court were to be his daily companions. No wonder his friends watched the young courtier's career with anxiety! ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... usual rigmarole about "his own family," and "hard times," and "diminished resources," and all those stereotype commonplaces which are for ever on the lips of stereotype insincere people. Mr. Clifford did not perceive the dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, which lay at the bottom of Mr. Edgerton's seemingly innocent assumption; and the latter took his leave, vexed with himself at having made the unsuccessful application—but still more ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... resumed with a laugh, "is permitted in this little group, so near nature's heart, I think I must follow this small maiden's example, and stick to my original statement. For once, Miss Burton, we have won the advantage over you, and have proved that yours are the only insincere words that have been spoken. But I know that if I stay another moment I shall be worsted. So I shall leave the field before victory is exchanged for ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... and Anna with her special gift for getting on with everyone, had in the early days of her life in Petersburg made friends in this circle also. Now, since her return from Moscow, she had come to feel this set insufferable. It seemed to her that both she and all of them were insincere, and she felt so bored and ill at ease in that world that she went to see the Countess Lidia Ivanovna as little ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... affected the issue, that instead of fulfilling my expectations the event left me more despondent than before. The King wrote, indeed, and within the hour, and his letter was in form an apology. But it was so lacking in graciousness; so stiff, though it began "My good friend Rosny," and so insincere, though it referred to my past services, that when I had read it I stood awhile gazing at it, afraid to turn lest De Vic and Varennes, who had brought it, should read my disappointment in ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... the word duplicity in no depreciatory sense. In chapter ii. of the "Seven Lamps," Section 18, I especially guarded this incrusted school from the imputation of insincerity, and I must do so now at greater length. It appears insincere at first to a Northern builder, because, accustomed to build with solid blocks of freestone, he is in the habit of supposing the external superficies of a piece of masonry to be some criterion of its thickness. But, as soon as he gets acquainted with the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... crept down to the dining-room when we first met, and from that day to this you have been kind and helpful to me. I said that I regarded you as one of the best friends I had in the world. Do you think me insincere? Do you think I forget how kind you were when society would not have tolerated the ghost I was? I am not one who forgets and ignores the past—who can go on to new friends with a frigid shoulder for old ones. Let us end these misunderstandings. Before the year is out you will probably ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... play are in harmony with this conclusion. For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some faults and utterly refuses to tolerate others. The Agamemnon may be slow in getting to work; it may be stiff with antique conventions. It never approaches to being cheap or insincere or shallow or sentimental or showy. It never ceases to be genuinely a "criticism of life." The theme which it treats, for instance, is a great theme in its own right; it is not a ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... intermission, and imagined I had held out so long on virtuous motives only; but now he could plainly perceive that his want of success had been owing to my want of affection, and that all my professions were insincere. In a word, he persuaded me that his remonstrances were just and reasonable. I could not see the affliction of a man I loved, when I knew it was in my power to remove it; and, rather than forfeit his opinion of my sincerity ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... brown, began to flush slowly in the centre of the cheeks. The colour spread till all that he saw of her was suffused, and she turned away. He thought he had shocked her, and so did she. Neither knew that the body can be insincere and express not the emotions we feel but those that we should like to feel. In reality she was quite calm, and her dislike of him had nothing emotional in ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... colors, to harmonize with their characters. Cattaraugus, the eldest, was white, and he had high impulses and a pure heart; Catiline, the youngest, was black, and he had a self-seeking nature, his motives were nearly always base, he was truculent and insincere. He was vain and foolish, and often said that he would rather be what he was, and live like a bandit, yet have none above him, than be a cat-o'-nine-tails ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... objected. "She's so extravagant in her praise of Harry that it seems unreal. It sounds insincere. Then, again, when I swear I will find him she shows a delight that you might describe as savage, almost vindictive. As though, if I did find Harry, the first thing she would do would be to stick ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... and that I'm the only girl. That's part of the game. I can play it"—her little eyes began to dance—"quite as well as you. But it's playing with something that's quite too serious to be played with—after all, isn't it, now? It's insincere, and, as I tell you, from now on I'm going to be as true and as sincere and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Catholics—very much as the official of an English Government might feel towards some savage tribe whom he had been sent out to govern. But at the same time it is an entire mistake to represent Swift as insincere in the efforts which he made to ameliorate the condition of the Irish people, and to redress some of the gross wrongs which he saw inflicted on them. The administrator of whom we have already spoken might have ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... came towards me and embrac'd me with much kindnesse, telling me if he had thought my danger would have been so greate, he would not have suffer'd his Majesty to employ me in that station.' And so on, 'after which I got home, not being very well in health.' It certainly was such ridiculously insincere treatment that it might well have caused immediate sickening in one of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Meanwhile I have no ideas, and my visitors to-day haven't given me any, though Lord Wilburton might be a useful figure in a book; so perfectly appointed, so quiet, so deferential, so humorous, so deliciously insincere! ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... theology; but his religion was so loose, and his inquiries for the reason of every thing which he was to believe, became so offensive to the rabbies, that he was thrust out of the synagogue. In consequence of this, he became a Christian, and was baptized; but his conversion was insincere, and though, during his life, he did not openly profess himself an atheist, his posthumous works plainly proved him such. He died, of a consumption, at the Hague, February, 1677, aged forty-five. He is the founder of a regular system of atheism, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... all the awful, second-rate girls I ever met, she's the worst! She has vermilion hair and an imitation Oxford manner. She's so horribly refined that it's dreadful to listen to her. She's a sly, creepy, slinky, made-up, insincere vampire! She's common! She's awful! She's ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... minutes you began to talk about taint, and contamination, and dabbling in mud,—and all in relation to me. There are your two propositions, sir. You may only stand on one, and I feel sure that you stand on the last one. Yes, I am right. You do. And you were insincere, confess, when you found my conduct unwise only from the social point of ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... right; and, alas! my dear Harriet, it requires more of the spirit of Christ than I possess to hear such assertions without ungovernable impatience. I do not believe the people who utter them are insincere or dishonest in stating such convictions; but I am shocked at the indignation with which such ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... true Polynesian cast of countenance may be put down at about 7000. D'Urville says "they combine the most opposite qualities. They are generous, courteous, and hospitable, yet avaricious, insolent, and always thoroughly insincere. The most profuse demonstration of kindness and friendship may at any moment be interrupted by an act of outrage or robbery, should their cupidity or their self-respect ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... imminent destruction, when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing came ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... eight thousand men, are natives. The aboriginal inhabitants are called Tagals. They are somewhat idle, though a good-natured, pleasure-loving race; are nominally Roman Catholics, but very superstitious and insincere. Their houses are formed of bamboo raised on piles, the interior covered by mats, on which the whole family sleep, with a mosquito curtain over them. The ornaments in their houses are generally a figure of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the May, 1920, Socialist Convention is a series of insincere, futile, clever attempts to whitewash the blood-red of the known and proved Socialist principles and aims, these attempts in turn combated by the more honest delegates, and the net result being the re-affirmation in tangible and important matters of these same menacing principles and ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... their Thackeray in many ways, but they think him rather a writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a Philistine than a supreme artist or a great man. To them there is something artificial in the man and something insincere in the artist: something which makes it seem natural that his best work should smack of the literary tour de force, and that he should never have appeared to such advantage as when, in Esmond and in Barry Lyndon, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... not supporting the idea of an elderly Romeo. When it came to the scenes where Romeo "poses" and is poetical but insincere, Henry did seem elderly. He couldn't catch the youthful pose of melancholy with its extravagant expression. It was in the repressed scenes, where the melancholy was sincere, the feeling deeper, and the expression slighter, that he was at ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... quite naturally set on such insincere distortions of values as are necessary to a constant succession of "big parts" for themselves. Sincerity does not necessarily exclude heroic characters, but it does exclude those mock heroics which actor-managers have been known to prefer—not to real heroics, perhaps, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... then was perhaps the common experience of such natures. Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained for him utterly vanished. He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and—had he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary—VULGAR. Rather, perhaps, it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and action of those who frequented it—and for whom it was built—were of a lower grade than his own. And, strangely enough, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Anglo-Normans, who appear to have had periodical fits of piety, after periodical temptations to replenish their coffers out of their neighbours' property. We may not quite judge their reparations as altogether insincere; for surely some atonement for evil deeds is better than an utter recklessness ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... genius," said the one; "not enough for an orphan," the other; and the first offered me my passage like a pauper immigrant, and the second refused me a day's wage as a hewer of stone—plain dealing for an empty belly. They had not been insincere in the past; they were not insincere to-day: change of circumstance had introduced a new criterion: that ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... who, without having anything exceptional in their natures or purposes or visions, yet try to be different for the sake of being different. They are not content to be what they are; they wish to be "utterly other." Of course they are hollow, artificial, insincere; moreover they are nuisances. Their very foundations are wrong ones. Be yourself unless you're a fool; in that case, of course, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... received, under whatever circumstances of wrong, at least the forms of popular sovereignty. The reality of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves. The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... women when they beguile us with insincere professions," replied she, rising up in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Mrs. Wimbush thinks she can answer that question, and as my want of gaiety has at last worn out her patience she has given me a glimpse of her shrewd guess. I'm made restless by the selfishness of the insincere friend—I want to monopolise Paraday in order that he may push me on. To be intimate with him is a feather in my cap; it gives me an importance that I couldn't naturally pretend to, and I seek to deprive him of social refreshment because I fear that meeting more disinterested ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... life to music for me, a life that has always had to be occupied with many things besides writing. Not, however, that I claim to have written much poetry: only perhaps some true rhymes: I do not see how there could be any pleasure in writing insincere ones. ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and "the Zoili of Albemarle Street" talked to him "about morality," he flames out, "I maintain that it is the most moral of poems." He looked ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... from her son's estate near Lyons, and having thereby procured for me the honor of this introduction." Both Monsieur Lomaque's red-rimmed eyes were seized with a sudden fit of winking, as he made this polite speech. His enemies were accustomed to say that, whenever he was particularly insincere, or particularly deceitful, he always took refuge in the weakness of his eyes, and so evaded the trying ordeal of being obliged to look steadily at the person whom he was ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... part, to be explained by the literary interests before mentioned. For Johanna was always in a tremble lest Ephie should become spoiled; and thoughtless Ephie could, at times, cause her a most subtle torture, by being prettily insincere, by assuming false coquettish airs, or by seeming to have private thoughts which she did not confide to her sister. This, and the knowledge that Ephie was now of an age when every day might be expected to widen the distance between them, sometimes made Johanna ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... distribute it at home, and whom it is a penal offence even to teach to read it? Do we not send remonstrances to Tuscany, about the Madiai, when women are imprisoned in Virginia for teaching slaves to read? Is all this hypocritical, insincere, and impertinent in us? Are we never to send another missionary, or make another appeal for foreign lands, till we have abolished slavery at home? For my part, I think that imperfect and inconsistent outbursts of generosity and feeling ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... of courage and insincere opposition are always the refuge of a coward. Here was a nation demanding that which was necessary for its trade, desirous of reaching a solution through peaceful means if possible, but determined to acquire it at ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... was impossible to get the public as a whole to realize what the situation was. Sincere zealots who believed that all combinations could be destroyed and the old-time conditions of unregulated competition restored, insincere politicians who knew better but made believe that they thought whatever their constituents wished them to think, crafty reactionaries who wished to see on the statute-books laws which they believed unenforceable, and the almost solid "Wall Street crowd" or representatives of "big business" ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... host's offers are sometimes insincere when they refer to some magnificent dish yet uncut. In such cases you should refuse feebly for yourself, but accept on behalf of the lady next you,—merely out ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... occasional glances at the mirror of his dressing-table. In spite of these little alleviations, his trouble was great and all too real, for, unhappily, the previous rehearsal of an emotional scene does not prove the emotion insincere. ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... on it now, up-stairs with Brodrick in his study. She knew infallibly what their judgment would be. Just as she had seemed to them so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant, insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. She said to herself that it was all very well for Nina to talk. This insight was a curse. It was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... were made to the Darwinian theory in its early days. I cannot agree with those who think that Buffon was an out-and-out evolutionist, who concealed his opinions for fear of the Church. No doubt he did trim his sails—the palpably insincere "Mais non, il est certain, par la revelation, que tous les animaux ont egalement participe a la grace de la creation,"[32] following hard upon the too bold hypothesis of the origin of all species from a single one, is proof of it. But he was too sane and matter-of-fact a thinker to go much ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... forces before he could consider their old friendship restored, Michael carried his duplicity so far as to conclude a truce with the emissaries and make a proposal to exchange hostages. The negotiations were, however, in all probability insincere on both sides; and, after further delay, the emissaries returned to their respective camps, and the opposing armies met in hostile array upon a plain between Hermanstadt and Schellenberg. Here each prince addressed his troops previous to the encounter. Cardinal ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... made public to enable my opponents to allege that I might have defeated Simmons, and that my action was insincere. As a result I had no further political intercourse with Butler, and when the contest came in 1877 his action aided Mr. Hoar in securing the seat in the Senate. I presume, however, that Butler preferred my election, but he had hopes for himself, or at least that the election would go to a third ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... sensation, excitement, adventure, of just all that, in fact, which he had forsworn, had agreed with himself to cast aside and forget. And, thinking of this, suspicion assailed him that forswearing had been slightly insincere and perfunctory. He accused himself of nourishing the belief that giving, he would also receive,—and that in kind,—while that any sacrifice which he offered would be returned to him doubled in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... that, As Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii), "God does not compel man to be righteous." Consequently in order that a man be justified by Baptism, his will must needs embrace both Baptism and the baptismal effect. Now, a man is said to be insincere by reason of his will being in contradiction with either Baptism or its effect. For, according to Augustine (De Bapt. cont. Donat. vii), a man is said to be insincere, in four ways: first, because he does not believe, whereas Baptism is the sacrament ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and destiny of human life similar to that which Schopenhauer expressed: "Truly optimism cuts so sorry a figure in this theatre of sin, suffering, and death that we should have to regard it as a piece of sarcasm, if Hume had not explained its origin—insincere flattery of God in the arrogant expectation ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... his simple quietude was really touching to true-hearted people. The elements of pathos do not permit of their being dispensed from a stout smoking bowl. I have to record no pathetic field-day. My father was never insincere in emotion. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... beyond the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... cotton to it, Gid. I was never at my ease, except when out riding, or shooting, or yachting. You see, the blood of the wilds is in my veins. I didn't like the whirl and gaiety and excitement of London. It seemed somehow hollow and insincere. I yearned for the freedom and simplicity of life on the prairies; couldn't put myself on a level with men who had been to public schools and universities, or talk with elegant ladies who were ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... account,—but it is the one upright, worthy, and beautiful thing a teacher can do. Any easier course he may choose to adopt in an institution of learning (even when it is taken helplessly or thoughtlessly as it generally is) is insincere and spectacular, a despising not only of the pupil but of the college public and ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... suddenly she felt as if Gaspare, too, were going, perhaps, to drift from her. She looked at him with an almost sharp intensity which hardened her whole face. Was he, too, being insincere with her, he whom she ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... social rectitude—members of the legislature—they might use the tu quoque argument: asking whether bribery of a customer's servant, is any worse than bribery of an elector? or whether the gaining of suffrages by claptrap hustings-speeches, containing insincere professions adapted to the taste of the constituency, is not as bad as getting an order for goods by delusive representations respecting their quality? No; it seems probable that close inquiry would show few if any classes to be free from immoralities ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... was inconceivable to them that she should choose to work in a shop; and her tongue had a causticity which was sometimes exceedingly disconcerting and mortifying. As for men, she was shy of them, and, moreover, she loathed the elaborate and insincere ritual of deference which the average man practises towards women unrelated to him, particularly when they are young and rich. Her father she adored, without knowing it; for he often angered her, and humiliated her ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... no evidence that the King was insincere in his oath; but unfortunately his piety was that of impulse, not of principle. The compact was soon broken, and the lnd was again compelled to bear the burden of exorbitant taxes. These were extorted by violence, partly to cover Henry's own extravagance, but ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... avoid and flee from insincere friendships! Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess. Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a stain on ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... apprehension and high resolve upon both sides. The colored men, conscious of their own rectitude, were either unaware of the real light in which their innocent parade was regarded by their white neighbors, or else laughed at the feeling as insincere and groundless. The whites, having been for generations firm believers in the imminency of servile insurrections; devoutly crediting the tradition that the last words of George Washington, words of wisdom and warning, were, "Never trust a nigger with a gun;" and accustomed ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... some day," she thought, "when I get old and quiet." She was neither old nor quiet now, and her youth cried out against so poor a consolation. Then she told herself that she had the child, only to reproach herself, a moment later, with the insincere repetition of a commonplace. The child was not enough; had her nature been such as to find the child enough, she would certainly never have become Alexander Quisante's wife. Always when she was most strongly repelled by him, there was in ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... employed on the most important duties, and knew so well how to choose them, that he was rarely disappointed in their qualities. Yet there were contradictions in the character of this artful and able monarch; for human nature is rarely uniform. Himself the most false and insincere of mankind, some of the greatest errors of his life arose from too rash a confidence in the honour and integrity of others. When these errors took place, they seem to have arisen from an over refined system of policy, which induced Louis to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... kiss has become a symbol for all treachery cloaked in the garb of affection. Its lessons and warnings are obvious, but this other may be added—that such audacity and nauseousness of hypocrisy is not reached at a leap, but presupposes long underground tunnels of insincere discipleship, through which a man has burrowed, unseen by others, and perhaps unsuspected by himself. Much hypocrisy of the unconscious sort precedes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... a sham semblance of religion which you are right in regarding as dull, for it is dull. When it is unreal and insincere it is deadly dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by people who have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. When a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the various influences that elevate us, and place us in presence ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... Witness," testifies that they are "neither cold nor hot." They did not have enough piety nor zeal to cause them to do anything for the honor of Christ and his cause, neither were they open enemies. They were merely lukewarm, insincere friends, and, as such, were in a position to do the greatest harm. A certain writer has said, "We always dread a professed but insincere friend; he is the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the Christian era, though some scholars have boldly asserted that they were forgeries even of a later date. Most of them seem to be expansions of lines of Anacreon. They are in general neat, pretty, and gaysome, but tame and insincere. There is nothing like earnestness in them, nothing like genuine deep feeling; but thus they are all the more suited for a certain class of lovers and drinkers, who do not wish to be greatly moved by anything under ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... dearest Aunt Hervey? What can I do? Were I capable of giving a hope I meant not to enlarge, then could I say, I would consider of your kind advice. But I would rather be thought perverse than insincere. Is there, however, no medium? Can nothing be thought of? Will nothing do, but to have a man who is the more disgustful to me, because he is unjust in the very ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of, felt to be insincere; no place for redemption of woman in the religions of; need of, can only be met by educated Indian Christian women; silent revolution has begun in; God alone will not redeem; future of, demands college education; the Aryan invades; Muhammadans invade; co-education in; superstition ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... was nothing to draw her forth from the tapestried chamber where her grandmother died, whither she herself had come that she might die, gently, without witnesses, without importunate solicitude, without suffering from the insincere demonstrations of egoism masquerading as affection, which double the agony ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... this. The manner of the fellow was so insincere that he could find no satisfaction in talking with him. Big Bob, however, did not go away. Instead, he sat down on a packing box which stood in the corner of the room and stuck the candle he carried up on the floor, under the window ledge so ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... series will help us to inquire whether we have any reason to distrust the sincerity of a statement. We ask whether the author was in any of those situations which normally incline a man to be insincere. We must ask what these situations are, both as affecting the general composition of a document, and as affecting each particular statement. Experience supplies the answer. Every violation of truth, small or great, is due to a wish on the part of the author to produce a particular ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... of prefaces is unmistakeably evidenced by their uncut leaves, and as unknown readers could scarcely be induced to read a book by the most cogent representations of an unknown author, and as apologies for "rushing into print" are too trite and insincere to have any effect, I will merely prefix a few explanatory ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... miss you." Henley was too honest—at least in domestic matters—to know that his assertion was insincere, and accustomed as he was in his dealings among men to assume exactly the shade of tone or set of face that went best with a statement, he now had as complete an air of regret and discomfort as the most exacting of wives could ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Anderson's fire the other day when his telephone bell rang. He made the usual insincere exclamation of disgust—as insincere as the horror we simulate when a bundle of letters is brought into the room, to have letters and to be called up on the telephone being really adventures and therefore welcome; and he then crossed the room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... to which he had taken himself in that matter not without good reasons. And he could say a sharp word or two in season about vestments; he was strong against candles, and fought for his side fairly well. No one had good right to complain of Captain Aylmer as being insincere; but had his aunt known the whole history of her nephew's life, I doubt whether she would have made him her heir thinking that in doing so she was doing the best ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... successful temptation the devil acquired a right over men. This right cannot be destroyed, but only bought off. God offers the devil Christ's soul in exchange for the souls of men. This proposal of exchange was, however, insincere, as God knew that the devil could not keep hold of Christ's soul, because a sinless soul could not but cause him torture. The devil agreed to the bargain and was duped. Christ did not fall into the power of death and the devil, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... left his conscience, his religion, his sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives, untouched."[2233] That means that it was a fad and was insincere. There were men who were great scholars within the standards of humanism, but the enthusiasm for art, the zeal for Latin and Greek literature, the cooperative struggle for exhumations and specimens, were features of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... unsuitable, like her clothes, always imitations and soon gone, to be superseded by more of the same sort. What thoughtful woman desires to feel herself part of an influence which leads to so much that is insincere, uneconomical, wasteful both of raw material and of the infinitely more important material which makes women's souls? What teacher of young girls has a right to hold back from setting her hand against the formation ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... man of about thirty; tall, slender, lithe, swarthy, with thin, expressive lips that were twisted upward at one corner in an insincere smirk. This taller man came close to the wagon and paused in an attitude of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... as he once remarked long afterwards, his ideal.) 'After quoting these words,' says Mr. Davies in conclusion, 'I may be permitted to add those with which he closed the note written to me before he went to India (November 4, 1869), "God bless you. It's not a mere phrase, nor yet an unmeaning or insincere one in my ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... twenty years following the passing of the Toleration Act. After the death of Queen Anne others were built, but in no great numbers. The prevailing impression of the state of religion in England during the first half of the eighteenth century is a gloomy one. Formalism and apparently an insincere repetition of the doctrinal phrases imposed by the law was but too evident in the State Church. Dissent had its bright features, but these grew dim as years went on. It must be admitted that the odds were heavy against ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... respect be worth preserving at all, it can be preserved only by immediate action. Any other course than immediate severing of diplomatic relations with both Germany and Austria will deepen the English opinion into a conviction that the Administration was insincere when it sent the Lusitania notes and that its notes and protests need not be taken seriously on any subject. And English opinion is allied opinion. The Italian Ambassador[12] said to me, 'What has happened? The United States of to-day is not the United States I knew fifteen years ago, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... option. The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by "that sort of thing" cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself. I wasn't capable of it. It was then that I discovered that being killed by "that sort of thing," I mean the absolute conviction of it, was, so to speak, nothing in itself. The horrible ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... below. Where now the French habitant sits chattering with his confreres and smoking his pipe filled with home-grown tabac were once the shady walks and stiff parterres of the ancient garden. Here, under the summer moons, were doubtless stolen meetings as sweet, vows as insincere, and intrigues as foolish as those in the exquisite bowers of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles. On its paths have fallen the martial tread of "de Levis, de Beaujeu, and many a brave soldier and dainty courtier, official guests at the Governor's Chateau." Among ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... the dove had not uttered a word. She sat quite still staring at the bat, and wondering to hear such insincere speeches of flattery. Suddenly ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... speak so strangely, my love. It sounds insincere to me. (She looks unutterable reproach at him.) Yes, dear, nonsense is always insincere; and my dearest is talking nonsense. Just nonsense. (Her face darkens into dumb obstinacy. She stares straight before her, and does not look at him again, absorbed in Richard's fate. He scans her face; ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... ranks of the army and navy. The line about bowing, smirking and glozing, refers to the comparative insincerity of the higher society into which so many of the scholars must eventually pass. "Smirking" suggests insincere smiles, "glozing" implies tolerating or lightly passing over faults or wrongs or serious matters that should not be considered lightly. Society is essentially insincere and artificial in all countries, but especially so in England. The old ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... dismayed. I was dumb at such a callous summing-up of my honest action. All I could stammer out was some feeble, trite protest against a disordered life, which sounded insincere, but certainly was not that. When I urged her in the name of religion to go home, she opened her eyes with an expression of scornful incredulity. She was fully six years younger than me, and yet strangely my senior. Without being told so, I had the intuition ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... rectitude—members of the legislature—they might use the tu quoque argument: asking whether bribery of a customer's servant, is any worse than bribery of an elector? or whether the gaining of suffrages by claptrap hustings-speeches, containing insincere professions adapted to the taste of the constituency, is not as bad as getting an order for goods by delusive representations respecting their quality? No; it seems probable that close inquiry would show few if any classes to be free from immoralities ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... been a perfectly abstemious occasion, one imagines that Beaverbrook at the dinner was sincere, though playing the actor, and that in his room he was both theatrical and insincere. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... him who knows a remedy and withholds it from the sufferer, that Ahithophel advised that a sacrifice should be offered at every step taken by the priests. Although the measure proved efficacious, and no further disaster occurred in connection with the Ark, yet Ahithophel's words had been insincere. He knew the real reason of the misadventure, and concealed it from the king. Instead of following the law of having the Ark carried on the shoulders of priests, David had had it put on a wagon, and so incurred ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... may not ere long be again occupied in demanding promises of the Pope?—whether the Pope may not again think it wise to promise mountains and marvels?—whether these new promises may not be just as hollow and insincere as the old ones? This short paragraph deserves a long commentary, for it ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... to hold fast to justice—not to pay itself by petty revenges. To associate Madame Merle with its disappointment would be a petty revenge—especially as the pleasure to be derived from that would be perfectly insincere. It might feed her sense of bitterness, but it would not loosen her bonds. It was impossible to pretend that she had not acted with her eyes open; if ever a girl was a free agent she had been. A girl in love was doubtless not a free agent; but the sole source of her mistake ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... But I don't in the least consider that I'm living in one of his books at all. I shouldn't care for that in the least," she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke. "I'm afraid I'm not very literary. And I'm not ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... the defence of its national possessions. Here in Marienburg I proclaim that I expect all the brothers of the Order of St. John to be at my service when I call upon them to protect German ways and German customs." The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date—a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania. What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him, and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned. Brown and McTavish also doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices. His appetite had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table. There was no question but what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin he had taken. McTavish, rifle in hand, went out ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common courtesy, would not dream ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is questionable whether the offers of the Commons were sincere. But Charles, by his vacillation and hesitation, by yielding one day and retracting the next, gave them the opportunity of asserting, with some show of reason, that he was wholly insincere, and could not be trusted; and so the commission was recalled, and ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... that you are very fastidious, Fabian. Do you expect always to be able to keep Violet from meeting with 'ignorant, insincere and unreliable' people, in a world like this?" inquired Mr. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... with the unimpassioned and prosaic tone of the time, was the low state of religious feeling, and the degeneration of the church, both in its own organization and in public esteem. The upper classes of society, as a rule, were lukewarm and insincere in any form of belief. Statesman and nobles in the most prominent positions combined professed irreligion with open profligacy, while the lower classes were left, through the indolence and selfishness of the clergy, almost without religious teaching. Montesquieu found that people ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Tibboo or Tuarick, who, though very knowing fellows, are, comparatively with the Fezzaners, fair in their dealings. Their moral character is on a par with that of the Tripolines, though, if any thing, they are rather less insincere. Falsehood is not considered odious, unless when detected; and when employed in trading, they affirm that it is allowed by the Koran, for the good of merchants. However this may be, Captain Lyon asserts, that he never could find ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... advantage. On the other hand Thomas's conduct, which must have been exceedingly exasperating to the hot blood which Henry had inherited, must be severely condemned in many details. We cannot avoid the feeling that much about it was insincere and theatrical, and even an intentional challenging of the fate he seemed to dread. But yet it does not appear what choice was left him between abjectly giving up all that he had been trained to believe of the place of the Church in the world and entering on ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... not some time or other dart his sudden and searching glance. It is truly said of him by Emerson that "there have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the incomparable old-new French of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... easily teaches them to avoid it. In social intercourse I observe that a man's politeness is usually more helpful and a woman's more caressing. This distinction is natural, not artificial. A man seeks to serve, a woman seeks to please. Hence a woman's politeness is less insincere than ours, whatever we may think of her character; for she is only acting upon a fundamental instinct; but when a man professes to put my interests before his own, I detect the falsehood, however disguised. Hence it is ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Whether there are or are not natural frontiers, there are natural barriers, and the Alps hinder trade and make direct influence difficult; and what the popular vote would be nobody here doubted. Be sure that nobody did in Switzerland. The Swiss have been insincere, it seems to me—talking of terror when they thought chiefly of territory. But I feel tenderly for poor heroic Garibaldi, who has suffered, he and his minority. He is not a man of much brain; which makes the subject the more cruel to him. But I can't write of Garibaldi ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... sensitive, and his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... lives have but one solace, one ecstasy, one joy. By what treachery had he been moved to all this, if he really loved another? That he was simply amusing himself with the sort of flirtation she herself could take up as a mere pastime was not to be believed. That the worshipper should be insincere in his worship was too dreadful to think of. And yet it was to this very man she had once turned to avenge herself on Walpole's treatment of her; she had even said, 'Could you not make a quarrel with him?' Now, no woman ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... had won by the success of his veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent upon curtailing ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... minnesingers have paid for the capital they borrowed. The skill both of Northern and Southern Frenchmen is seldom to seek in lyric: we cannot give them too high praise as fashioners of instruments for other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the trouvere, the half artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the langue d'oc, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the diviner elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... highest order, and not a puling love play. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may."—Preface to Marino Faliero. Is not "Romeo and Juliet" a love play? —But why reason about such insincere, splenetic trash?—ED.] ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... like ours? But my whole sympathy is excited whenever I see sincerity struggling to the light. And that is why I believe that you are on the right path now, that you have entered upon this combat with falsehood. It is better to be utterly beaten in the battle than to lead a peaceful but insincere life." ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... "pure." What happens to her in modern France it would be difficult to say. The English do not come and burn her for a witch; but English people do not like the type, do not understand it, and generally prefer the insincere Madonnas or the Madame Bovarys of France. But to understand France one must take cognizance of this feminine crusading spirit. Much that is genuine and worth while in France can be associated with the type of Joan. Even in the midst of modern politics ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... I have taken—I do not intend to give it up just now, so I will soon drive him to a different way with you, while you have no share in the matter, but that of merely suffering me to assume, at once, the character of an old friend, and not an insincere one. On the latter point, indeed, you must believe me to be just as sincere as my father is insincere, for you very well know, Wilton, that, in this world of ours, it is much more by avoiding the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... direct to the elevator, and when it stopped at the top floor, Brent himself opened the door, as before. He was dismissing a short fat man whom Susan placed as a manager, and a tall, slim, and most fashionably dressed woman with a beautiful insincere face—anyone would have at once declared her an actress, probably a star. The woman gave Susan a searching, feminine look which changed swiftly to superciliousness. Both the man and the woman were loath to go, evidently had not finished what ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... The whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural forces out of cosmic atoms, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... when, viewing with a compassion, most rare in those days, the impending fate of the heroic mountaineers, the powerful Count of Toggenborg tried to negotiate a peace with the Duke. Leopold's terms, however, were so humiliating and evidently so insincere that nothing came ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... his special work. He kept aloof from party politics, and was only roused when great principles were at stake. Few of the leading politicians satisfied him. Peel seemed too cautious, Gladstone too subtle, Disraeli too insincere. It was the simplicity and kindliness of his relative Palmerston that won his heart, rather than confidence in his policy at home or abroad. The House of Commons suited him better than the colder atmosphere of the House of Lords; but in neither did he rise to speak ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... German speak of the Russian people without contempt and dislike. Indeed the Germans are so unable to see any charm in that profound and humane people that they believe that the English liking for them must be an insincere pretence, put forward for wicked or selfish reasons. What would they say if they saw a sight that is common in Indian towns, a British soldier and a Gurkha arm in arm, rolling down the street in cheerful brotherhood? And how is it that ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... confession of despair. If we are right in passing this measure, we are wrong in denying to the old government the right to interfere with slavery and to emancipate slaves. If we offer the slaves their freedom as a boon we confess that we are insincere and hypocritical in saying slavery was the best state for the negroes themselves. I believe that the arming and emancipating the slaves will be an abandonment of the contest. To arm the negroes is to give them freedom. When they come out scarred ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... of this pome Regards a lovely country home, He sighs, in words not insincere, "I think I'd like to live ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... and apprehension and high resolve upon both sides. The colored men, conscious of their own rectitude, were either unaware of the real light in which their innocent parade was regarded by their white neighbors, or else laughed at the feeling as insincere and groundless. The whites, having been for generations firm believers in the imminency of servile insurrections; devoutly crediting the tradition that the last words of George Washington, words of wisdom and warning, were, "Never trust a nigger with a gun;" and accustomed ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1913, p. 199) complains of the "great insincerity of inverts in not acknowledging their inversion;" but, as Sadger himself admits, we cannot be surprised at this so long as inversion is counted a crime. The most normal persons, under similar conditions, would be similarly insincere. If the homosexual differ in any respect, under this aspect, from the heterosexual, it is by exhibiting a more frequent tendency to be slightly neuropathic, nervously sensitive, and femininely emotional. These ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... believe he is actually insincere. I have noticed that men who write or read much ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... his forces before he could consider their old friendship restored, Michael carried his duplicity so far as to conclude a truce with the emissaries and make a proposal to exchange hostages. The negotiations were, however, in all probability insincere on both sides; and, after further delay, the emissaries returned to their respective camps, and the opposing armies met in hostile array upon a plain between Hermanstadt and Schellenberg. Here each prince addressed his troops previous to ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual in the English moderates ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... were little better than buttresses of ice, which would infallibly thaw before the heat of ministerial influence, when artfully concentrated; that either a minister's professions of patriotism were insincere; or his credit insufficient to effect any essential alteration in the unpopular measures of government; and that, after all, the liberties of the nation could never be so firmly established, as by the power, generosity, and virtue of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... cunning, diplomatic, intriguing, sharp, subtle, artful, deceitful, foxy, knowing, shrewd, tricky, crafty, designing, insincere, maneuvering, sly, wily. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... amazingly high motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton's most ordinary actions, and happily he had been so ordinary a person that no impossible shock had been given to the ideal built up about him. And it had not been difficult or insincere to carry on something of the same illusion with regard to the man who had won the Victoria Cross and had been very popular with Tommy Atkins. David Bright's very reserves, the closed doors in his domestic life, did not prevent, and indeed ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... more than once impelled To utter words of confidence and cheer, Whereat some dismal publicists rebelled As premature, ill-founded, insincere— Words none the less triumphantly upheld By Victory's verdict, resonantly clear, Words that inspired misgiving in the foe Because you do not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... two peculiarities—one was a great dislike for Ronald, the other a sincere dread of all love and lovers for her children. From her they heard nothing but depreciation of men. All men were alike, false, insincere, fickle, cruel; all love was nonsense and folly. Mrs. Vyvian tried her best to counteract these ideas; they had this one evil consequence—that neither Lillian nor Beatrice would ever dream of even naming such subjects ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... the moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for the writer is obviously insincere. I see the Saturday Review says the passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free from an occasional ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... took the heart out of the tribes confederated under Pontiac's masterly leadership, then Dunmore's War permitted us to begin life as a republic without having the Alleghanies for our western boundary. Nor can I hold in these latter days that His Lordship was insincere in waging the war; for England was against ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... teaching, striving for centuries only after privilege, patronage, and political power. Was ever such a topsy-turvyism? Instead of being a bridge over the great gulf between wealth and poverty, the Church still savors to him too much of the "be content where you are" sentiment. To him she is insincere, and consequently his pew is empty. He doesn't want an insurance agency only for the next world; he wants a kingdom of righteousness, joy, and peace, first in this world, where Christ intended it to be, as well as in the next. Church authority can no longer compel his interest; ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... began to talk about taint, and contamination, and dabbling in mud,—and all in relation to me. There are your two propositions, sir. You may only stand on one, and I feel sure that you stand on the last one. Yes, I am right. You do. And you were insincere, confess, when you found my conduct unwise only from the social point ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... from his pocket and opened it amid a breathless silence. His listeners noted the care with which he attended to gesture and demeanour, and accounted it to him for righteousness; for they were French. An English audience would have thought him insincere, and they would ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... you should come, Tavia," declared Dorothy, with emphasis, "and she has the reputation of never giving an insincere invitation. She likes you, and wants to enjoy you, as well as to have you ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... were still those among us who believed your course was polite, but insincere, and those among you who assumed that our professed attitude was sentimental and unreal. Bitterness had departed, and sectional hate was no more, but there were those who feared, even if they did not believe, that between the great sections of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... moments when I completely lose heart. For whom and for what do I write? For the public? But I don't see it, and believe in it less than I do in spooks: it is uneducated, badly brought up, and its best elements are unfair and insincere to us. I cannot make out whether this public wants me or not. Burenin says that it does not, and that I waste my time on trifles; the Academy has given me a prize. The devil himself could not make head or tail of it. Write for the sake of money? But I never have any money, and not being ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... that negotiations broke down owing to the masterful tone adopted by the Directory. It was perhaps unfortunate that Lord Malmesbury was selected as the English negotiator, for his behaviour in the previous year had been construed by the French as dilatory and insincere. But the Directors may on better evidence be charged with postponing a settlement until they had struck down their foes within France. Bonaparte's letters at this time show that he hoped for the conclusion of a peace with England, doubtless in order that his own pressure on Austria ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... refraining from speaking the truth when to do so is a duty. There are also those who are all things to all men, who say one thing and do another, like Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways; only deceiving themselves when they think they are deceiving others—and who, being essentially insincere, fail to evoke confidence, and invariably in the end turn out failures, if ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... say. She marries, and buys furniture, crockery, and lace curtains cheap and unsuitable, like her clothes, always imitations and soon gone, to be superseded by more of the same sort. What thoughtful woman desires to feel herself part of an influence which leads to so much that is insincere, uneconomical, wasteful both of raw material and of the infinitely more important material which makes women's souls? What teacher of young girls has a right to hold back from setting her hand against the formation ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... justly in order to acquire reputation, and wealth through reputation, even so as to seem to act from a love of sincerity and justice, and yet does not act sincerely and justly from affection for the Divine law or from obedience to it, he is still inwardly insincere and unjust, and his works are thefts, for through a pretense of sincerity and justice ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... with a different accent: "Ce Paul Jones etait une bien mauvaise tete." Certainly Jones's diplomacy, which was of a direct character, was not equal to his present situation, unfamiliar to him, and for success demanding conduct tortuous and insincere to an Oriental degree. Jones, in comparison with his associates in Russia, was remarkably truthful,—a trait which involved him in humiliating difficulties, and which was a source of irritation to the empress and to ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... exercises over all with whom it may have contact or connection. Though firm in every expression, and manly in every movement, there was nothing in the habit and appearance of Ralph, which, to the eye of those around, savored of the murderer. There was nothing ruffianly or insincere. But, as the testimony proceeded—when the degree of intimacy was shown which had existed between himself and the murdered man—when they heard that Forrester had brought him wounded and fainting to his home—had attended him—had ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... here was the trouble at the bottom of it all! Here was the strain of conviction pressing sorely, steadily in upon him through the tumult of his thoughts—was it nothing for her to be insincere? Did she even know what sincerity was? Would he marry an insincere woman? Insincerity was a growth not only ineradicable, but sure to spread over the nature as one grew older. He knew young people over whose minds it had begun to creep like the mere ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... was most pleasing, while about them had hovered the faintest, most elusive aroma of love. In her thought, she went over their long conversation again and again, and dwelt on all that he had said with constant delight. For to women admiration is always pleasing, even though they may know it to be insincere. To young women it is a wine that makes them feel themselves rulers of the earth, and to their elders it is a cordial which makes ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... the national bankruptcy which the Court and the nobles were bringing on. And the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duke of Orleans, was the centre of an active organisation. Since the king had proved himself incompetent, helpless, and insincere, men had looked to the Duke as a popular prince of the Blood, who was also wealthy and ambitious, and might avail to save the principle of monarchy, which Lewis had discredited. His friends clung to the idea, and continued to conspire in his interest after the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... gestures may have the effect of making the pictures in themselves the main object. The action here should be informal, unstudied, and merely remotely suggestive. The speaker should keep to his one central idea, and keep with his audience. Otherwise the speech will be insincere and purposeless, perhaps absurd. The fundamental, not the superficial, should determine the action. Young speakers almost invariably pick out words or phrases, suggesting the possibility of a gesture, and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... wherever grouped. It looked too well; an extravagant guarantee was offered to the Intraprendenti (contractors) by the Roman Government. The Parisian Count was to procure capitalists for the undertaking. The general opinion at the time was, that the Government was insincere in their extravagant guarantee; and they stipulated with the Count a condition as to time, calculated, as was supposed, to frustrate the undertaking. In this, however, the Government was outwitted; for capitalists ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... blind all but the finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every form it finds prepared for its indwelling. Johnson and the rest were right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of Lycidas, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity which drowns its ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... from his knee, in a burst of honest indignation exclaimed, "Oh! king, remember what is done by thee this day. Refusing to give righteous judgment in favor of one who prefers virtue to a crown and life! As insincere, as secret, have been your last conditions with him, but they will be revealed when the great Judge that searcheth all men's hearts shall cause thee to answer for this matter at the dreadful day of universal ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... point on which men seem to me rather insincere toward women. When they speak to women, the objection made to their voting is usually that they are too angelic. But when men talk to each other, the general assumption is, that women should not vote because they have not brains enough—or, as old Theophilus Parsons ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... temperament), Lettice would feel this person was good to know, whether the world approved her choice of friends or not. And when she wanted to know man or woman, she exerted herself to please—mainly by showing that she herself was pleased. She did not exactly flatter—she was never insincere—but it amounted to much the same thing as flattery. She listened eagerly; her interest was manifested in her face, her attitude, her answers. In fact she was her absolute self, without reserve and without fence. No wonder that she incurred ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... shouts, quite wild with delight. "That's the style! Foller on! Foller on!" And then, subsiding into his seat with intense satisfaction, "Done his job, anyhow! Hope he'll be out of bed in a week!"—the last with an insincere affectation of sympathy for the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... many agents ready to present any and every kind of error to ensnare souls,—heresies prepared to suit the varied tastes and capacities of those whom he would ruin. It is his plan to bring into the church insincere, unregenerate elements that will encourage doubt and unbelief, and hinder all who desire to see the work of God advance, and to advance with it. Many who have no real faith in God or in His word, assent to some principles of truth, and pass as Christians; and thus they are enabled to introduce ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... small quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay—rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... there might have been different news got. Friedrich (who was never stingy in such matters, except to his own Generals, where it might do hurt) is profuse in his eulogies, in his admirations of Saxe; amiable to see, and not insincere; but which, perhaps, practically do ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... were his son Berwick, Cartwright Bishop of Chester, Powis, Dover, and Melfort. Of all the retinue, none was so odious to the people of Great Britain as Melfort. He was an apostate: he was believed by many to be an insincere apostate; and the insolent, arbitrary and menacing language of his state papers disgusted even the Jacobites. He was therefore a favourite with his master: for to James unpopularity, obstinacy, and implacability were the greatest recommendations ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were made public to enable my opponents to allege that I might have defeated Simmons, and that my action was insincere. As a result I had no further political intercourse with Butler, and when the contest came in 1877 his action aided Mr. Hoar in securing the seat in the Senate. I presume, however, that Butler preferred my election, but he had hopes for himself, or at least that the election would ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... frightens Mdlle. Hausse by her white passions (for they quarrel venomously). Mdlle. Hausse complains that when Mdlle. Blanche is in fury, "elle n'a pas de levres." I find also that Mdlle. Sophie dislikes Mdlle. Blanche extremely. She says she is heartless, insincere, and vindictive, which epithets, I assure you, are richly deserved. Also I find she is the regular spy of Mme. Heger, to whom she reports everything. Also she invents—which I should not have thought. I have now the entire charge of the English lessons. I have given two lessons ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... and his inquiries for the reason of every thing which he was to believe, became so offensive to the rabbies, that he was thrust out of the synagogue. In consequence of this, he became a Christian, and was baptized; but his conversion was insincere, and though, during his life, he did not openly profess himself an atheist, his posthumous works plainly proved him such. He died, of a consumption, at the Hague, February, 1677, aged forty-five. He is the founder of a regular ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... into positions in which their various graces and endowments were better exhibited and exercised. One deacon attested his fitness for his office by his delicate attentions to the sick; another, by his considerate kindness to the poor; and another, by his judicious treatment of the indolent, the insincere, and the improvident. One elder excelled as an awakening preacher; another, as a sound expositor; and another, as a sagacious counsellor: whilst another still, who never ventured to address the congregation, and whose voice was seldom heard at the meetings of the eldership, could ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... there is room for some misgiving that in places the Sagas have been affected by the contrary vice from that of effusive pathos, namely, by a pretence of courage and endurance. In some of the Northern poetry, as in Ragnar's Death-Song,[57] there may be detected the same kind of insincere and exaggerated heroism as in the modern romantic imitations of old Northern sentiment, now fortunately less common than in the great days of the Northern romantic movement at the beginning of this century. The old Northern poetry seems to have become at one stage too self-conscious of the literary ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Achitophel; but he had read Addison's Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of learning and taste among the English. Johnson will have it that these praises were insincere. "Nothing," says he, "is better known of Boileau than that he had an injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin; and therefore his profession of regard was probably the effect of his civility rather than approbation." Now, nothing is better known of Boileau ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mr. Knowles], "I love my friends and hate my enemies—which may not be in accordance with the Gospel, but I have found it a good wearing creed for honest men." [But he only regarded as "enemies" those whom he found to be double-dealers, shufflers, insincere, untrustworthy; a fair opponent he respected, and he could agree to differ with a friend without ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... defended her once to a privileged relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia had sewed her fingers off for the Missionary Society one winter and done nothing the next—"Athalia ISN'T fickle," Lewis explained; "fickle people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary; that's all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and 'Thalia must ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... imperfectly what we ought to do. However, we shall do what seems the best to be done—with what success has to be seen. I am heartily sick of politics and parties, and that, mainly, because they seem to me so insincere. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... learning is vivified by a captivating and brilliant personality, overflowing with feeling and humour. He makes no attempt to conceal himself behind the mask of a false objectivity. In the Introduction he hastens to tear off this mask, with which the insincere thought of our epoch is covered. He treats with contempt what he calls "the eternal straining for all-round treatment (Einerseits-Andererseits), the perpetual compromise which, under the hypocritical ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... to this. The manner of the fellow was so insincere that he could find no satisfaction in talking with him. Big Bob, however, did not go away. Instead, he sat down on a packing box which stood in the corner of the room and stuck the candle he carried up on the floor, under the window ledge so the wind would not extinguish it, ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... embattled "Tower" itself, with the central greensward enclosed by iron railings, and the great warehouses of St. Katherine's Dock, all remain as they must have been for years. The only new thing which has come into view is the garish and insincere Tower Bridge, undeniably fine as to its general effect when viewed from a distance down-river, with its historic background and the busy activities of the river at its feet. A sentiment which is ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... alarums that vivified the columns devoted by the press to the doings of the polite world; and Adrian Bond kept between the covers of his two or three thin little books—a confinement richly deserved by a writer so futile, superficial and insincere; but Leverett Whyland was less easily evaded by anybody who "banged about town" and who happened to be interested in public matters. Abner came against him at one of the sessions of the Tax Commission, a body that ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... may, by a coalition with copperheads and rebels, succeed, but the simple fact that nine- tenths of them who voted for him do not agree with him, and that he only controls the other tenth by power intrusted to him by the Union party, will damn him forever. Besides, he is insincere; he has deceived and misled his best friends. I know he led many to believe he would agree to the civil rights bill, and nearly all who conversed with him until within a few days believed he would acquiesce in the amendments, and even aid in securing ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... decision. This no doubt accorded with perceptions which he was not called upon to make public; but because he was a writer of fiction there seems to have arisen a tacit agreement, in some quarters, to call him insincere in his connection with this socialistic enterprise. He had not much to gain by leaving the community; for he had put into its treasury a thousand dollars, about the whole of his savings from the custom-house stipend, and had next to nothing to establish a home with elsewhere, while ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the constitutional system,—the officers as intelligent and reflecting men, the soldiers as staunch and contented royalists; but neither, in these recognized capacities, inspired confidence in the country, which looked upon their adhesion to the Charter as constrained or conditional, always insincere and covering other views. The right, even while honestly accepting the Charter, had also party interests to satisfy; when it aspired to power, it was not solely to govern according to its principles, and to place the restored monarchy on a solid basis: it ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... insincere though it was, bore a good result. When Adam met him, and inquired what doom had been decreed against him, Cain told how his repentance had propitiated God, and Adam exclaimed, "So potent is repentance, and I knew it not!" Thereupon he composed a hymn of praise to God, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... himself in the character of the "faithful and true Witness," testifies that they are "neither cold nor hot." They did not have enough piety nor zeal to cause them to do anything for the honor of Christ and his cause, neither were they open enemies. They were merely lukewarm, insincere friends, and, as such, were in a position to do the greatest harm. A certain writer has said, "We always dread a professed but insincere friend; he is the least ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... charges is, that the abolitionists, in declaring "that their object is not to stimulate the action of the General Government, but to operate upon the States themselves, in which the institution of domestic slavery exists," are evidently insincere, since the "abolition societies and movements are all ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the Universe! But after the High Priest had done this, after he had proven to the satisfaction of every atheist that God is a myth, old Jerry turns around and gives Khalid this warning: "Don't believe all he says, for I know that atheist well. He is as eloquent as he is insincere." ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Schopenhauer expressed: "Truly optimism cuts so sorry a figure in this theatre of sin, suffering, and death that we should have to regard it as a piece of sarcasm, if Hume had not explained its origin—insincere flattery of God in the arrogant ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... ambition, of passion, of headlong desire of sensation, excitement, adventure, of just all that, in fact, which he had forsworn, had agreed with himself to cast aside and forget. And, thinking of this, suspicion assailed him that forswearing had been slightly insincere and perfunctory. He accused himself of nourishing the belief that giving, he would also receive,—and that in kind,—while that any sacrifice which he offered would be returned to him doubled in value. Casting his bread upon the waters, he accused himself ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... statement in which he says that the change in the Spanish Government will not affect the Cuban plans in the least. The Cubans, he says, are fighting for liberty, and liberty they will have. They scornfully refuse the Spanish offers of Home Rule, believing them to be insincere and misleading. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... this time, my friends, in the pitiable, insincere way in which all England believed when the cholera was here sixteen years ago. When they saw human beings dying by thousands, they all got frightened, and proclaimed a Fast and confessed their sins and promised repentance in a general way. But did they repent of and confess ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... hearing about it from me; and besides—" She detected a shade of disappointment in his tone, and was sorry she had said anything which might seem meant to discourage his confidence. It occurred to her also that she had been insincere in not telling him at once that she had already been let into the secret of his domestic differences: she felt the same craving as Amherst for ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... idea of an elderly Romeo. When it came to the scenes where Romeo "poses" and is poetical but insincere, Henry did seem elderly. He couldn't catch the youthful pose of melancholy with its extravagant expression. It was in the repressed scenes, where the melancholy was sincere, the feeling deeper, and the expression slighter, that he was ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... of this place. I tried every way I could think of, to overcome their objections, but to no purpose. They have so little regard for truth, that one cannot rely much on what they say: I begin to think that it is all owing to the Tapan Gam, who I suspected was insincere in his professions. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Thou shalt avoid and flee from insincere friendships! Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess. Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a stain on ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... said I, since you will, you must read them; and I think I have no reason to be afraid of being found insincere, or having, in any respect, told you a falsehood; because, though I don't remember all I wrote, yet I know I wrote my heart; and that is not deceitful. And remember, sir, another thing, that I always declared ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... which composed Sherston's set of chambers, to make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in which ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... secular spirit in music. In Purcell that spirit reached its height. His music is always secular, always purely pagan. I do not mean that it is inappropriate in the church—for nothing more appropriate was ever written—nor that Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace. I should not like to have to define the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... "But I'm not insincere because of that, am I? I wish you hadn't thought that. Of course, one meets people, at the theatre and so on, and one doesn't really know them and can't get at them, and so one just tries to be very nice to them, but I don't ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the army are also Europeans. The rank and file, amounting to about eight thousand men, are natives. The aboriginal inhabitants are called Tagals. They are somewhat idle, though a good-natured, pleasure-loving race; are nominally Roman Catholics, but very superstitious and insincere. Their houses are formed of bamboo raised on piles, the interior covered by mats, on which the whole family sleep, with a mosquito curtain over them. The ornaments in their houses are generally a figure of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix, and their favourite game-cock. The men wear a ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... learned man thinks himself obliged to commence politician.—Such pamphlets will be as trifling and insincere as the venal quit-rent of a birth-day ode. [Footnote: On another scrap of paper I find "the miserable quit-rent of an annual pamphlet." It was his custom in composition (as will be seen by many other instances) thus to try the same thought in a variety of forms ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... added to his influence, which, as was natural with a foreigner, inclined towards the attractive and gainful course. Long afterwards the saviour of Prussia, Baron vom Stein, classed him among the narrow, selfish, insincere men who had been the ruin of nations.[342] Certainly he helped to ruin Poland; and now his conduct at Vienna clogged the efforts of Morton Eden and Malmesbury to strengthen the Coalition against France. Eden complained that he behaved as an intriguing subaltern ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... in a public house from which the door in the church roof and the hanging seat on the tower could be seen. He was more jovial than ever, and treated everybody in order to forget himself in their insincere admiration. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... much ready money, and it was often said that she was better off in the end than if he had lived. She regretted his loss deeply, however; it was impossible for her to speak of him, even to intimate friends, without emotion, and nobody had ever hinted that this emotion was insincere. She was most warm-hearted and generous, and in her limited way played the part of Lady Bountiful in ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... adaptation of metrical movement to the sense. Of Lycidas write a summary outline, indicating thought-divisions by line numbers; state the theme; and consider Unity. Does the conventional pastoralism render the poem artificial or insincere? Respective elements of Classicism and Romanticism ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... be in power—where it has rewards for pretense, where it pays a premium upon hypocrisy, where it at least is willing to purchase silence—it is easily conceivable that millions pretend to believe what they do not. And yet I believe it has been charged against myself, not only that I was insincere, but that I took the side I am on for the sake of popularity; and the audience tonight goes far toward ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... d'Aubigny, and it was quite consistent with all this—even setting apart the fact that he was perfectly well known to be only a poor miner—that he should lie again. Like most logical reasoners Mr. Ford forgot that humanity might be illogical and inconsistent without being insincere. He turned away without speaking as if indicating a wish ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... quality of paramount importance to the arguer is sincerity. This he must really possess if he is to be eminently successful. To feign it is almost impossible; some word or expression, some gesture or inflection of the voice, the very attitude of the insincere arguer will betray his real feelings. If he tries to arouse an emotion that he himself does not feel, his affectation will be apparent and his effort a failure. There are few things that an audience resents more than being tricked into an expression of feeling. If they even ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... with little refinement and strong sensual feelings virtually insult and thereby disgust and repel every female they meet. They look upon woman with an inherent vulgarity, and doubt the virtue and integrity of all alike. But it is because they are generally insincere and impure themselves, and with such a nature culture and refinement are out of the question, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... always impressed upon him that the Dunes had ever been lonely—lonely in a world that was contemptible. He had always until now accepted this idea and found it confirmed on every side. His six years at Rugby had encouraged him—he had despised, with his tolerant smile, boys and masters alike; all insincere, all weak, all to be used, if he wanted them, as he chose to use them. He had thought often of the lonely knight—that indeed should be his attitude to ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... actually wept at this point, and the maudlin tears were not altogether insincere. His own wife and children he heartily loved, and remembered them now with honest tenderness. At home he was not a drinker and a rough; only amid the hardships ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man's allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or ironical, but that he tends, in the [55] sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side of things; and ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... unkind thought of you, that I'd ever misinterpreted one look or word or action of yours, that I'd ever, in my egoism or my greed, striven to thwart one natural impulse of yours, or to force you into travesty away from simplicity! Don't—don't ever be unnatural or insincere with me, Maurice, even for a moment, even for fear of hurting me. Be always yourself, be the boy that you still are and that I love ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's rectitude ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... respectable ladies hypocritical or insincere? By no means—they believe every word they say; but a sort of necessity is laid upon them—a spell; and before the breath of the multitude their individual resolution melts away as the frosty tracery melts from the window panes of ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... evident that God had spoken; and this was all they made of it—they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and the trivial there is no message from God, no truth ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... word, and a kind thought for the good simple old mother, whom Pope tended so affectionately. Those men would have scarcely valued her, but that they knew how much he loved her, and that they pleased him by thinking of her. If his early letters to women are affected and insincere, whenever he speaks about this one, it is with a childish tenderness and an almost sacred simplicity. In 1713, when young Mr. Pope had, by a series of the most astonishing victories and dazzling achievements, seized the crown of poetry; and the town was in an uproar of admiration, or hostility, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a loose life," and she hardly dared to look into her soul, knowing that she would find confirmation of this opinion. She had not been to Mass, because at the Elevation she believed in spite of herself; so she had been as insincere in her unfaith as in her faith. Then there were the sins of the flesh, and their number and their blackness terrified her. There were sins that she strove to put out of her mind at once, sins she was even ashamed to think of; and the thought of confessing them struck her down, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... tour of the island. The number of the population who have the true Polynesian cast of countenance may be put down at about 7000. D'Urville says "they combine the most opposite qualities. They are generous, courteous, and hospitable, yet avaricious, insolent, and always thoroughly insincere. The most profuse demonstration of kindness and friendship may at any moment be interrupted by an act of outrage or robbery, should their cupidity or their self-respect be ever ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... understand; and that is, the liberal terms in which men at times express themselves, who yet profess the narrow orthodox view. I do not say they are insincere; but it does seem as if they deliberately ignored their own creed, and that they spoke for the time out of the conviction and sincerity of their hearts. Just now, glancing through a certain magazine, I have come on an instance of this ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... that this scheme was badly carried out. That might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was not that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practise, but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but insincere and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... fulfilling my expectations the event left me more despondent than before. The King wrote, indeed, and within the hour, and his letter was in form an apology. But it was so lacking in graciousness; so stiff, though it began "My good friend Rosny," and so insincere, though it referred to my past services, that when I had read it I stood awhile gazing at it, afraid to turn lest De Vic and Varennes, who had brought it, should read my ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... style is the man; and some will add that it does not, thus unsupported, amount to much of a man. But the style itself suffers some injustice from those who would speak thus. The views expressed are often quite foolish and often quite insincere; but the style itself is a manlier and more natural thing than is commonly made out. It is not in the least languorous or luxurious or merely musical and sensuous, as one would gather from both the eulogies and the satires, from the conscious and the unconscious imitations. On ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... or woman, but to weaken and corrupt the soul; the mind becomes foolishly dependent on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and momentary illusions of excellence; it is our experience that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, and insincere. If they have not such flamboyant qualities then they are tepid and ineffectual players. Nor may the samurai do personal services, except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... my country) that the real cause is not so much British hypocrisy as British stupidity—stupidity which keeps our minds in watertight compartments and prevents us perceiving how confused and inconsistent our own judgments are and how insincere they appear to our neighbours. At any rate, whether the cause is pure hypocrisy or pure stupidity, or whether a Scotch mixture of these, it cannot be denied that its result is most irritating to ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... of her eyes at the moment of danger. The breadth of that clear-complexioned forehead—almost concealed by the masses of brown hair bundled up around it—signified that if her disposition were oblique and insincere enough for trifling, coquetting, or in any way making a fool of him, she had the intellect to do ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the insincere man ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... strange thing to say, I think," returned Miss Starbrow quickly. "It is not my custom to be insincere." And then her sincerity almost compelled her to add, "But about your late husband I have said too much." For that was what she felt, and it vexed her soul to have to utter ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... answered. "I have nothing to pardon; only, I did not want you to misunderstand me." The gloves were on, and she shook hands with him, and laughed a comical little insincere laugh in his face, and ran away to her own room to have a foolish little cry. She heard her friend Cecile reading poetry to the wounded Wilkinson, and, looking out of her window, saw Mr. Perrowne helping her ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... to go to the other extreme, and sacrifice truth to politeness, read Mrs. Opie's "Tale of Potted Sprats," and you will not be likely to be insincere again. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... was destined to a complete triumph because it was the expression of vital forces which were necessary for the rejuvenation of literature. Yet it is true that romanticism carried with it much vague and insincere sentimentality, and it was partly against this that Johnson protested. Perhaps the twentieth-century mind is most dissatisfied with his lack of sympathy for the romantic return to an intimate appreciation ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... mediation of England in 1675; and to that congress Temple was deputed. The work of conciliation however, went on very slowly. The belligerent powers were still sanguine, and the mediating power was unsteady and insincere. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of "Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation, entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation. She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to literature—I ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... he resumed, taking the usual course from detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude and respect towards my cousin. It would not signify so much in a man whose talents ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... later times; which, little by little, loses its truth, and is accepted by the moderns only as a personification of victory itself,—not as an actual picture of the living Angel who led to victory. There is a wide difference between these two conceptions,—all the difference between insincere poetry, and sincere religion. This I have also endeavoured farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture; there is however one part of Athena's character which it would have been irrelevant to dwell upon there; yet which I must not ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... puzzled him. Since that day in Devonshire, when Claude had endeavored to intervene, the latter had spoken scarcely a dozen words to him. He shook hands with Jim at the station and with Angela, but his congratulations sounded weak and insincere. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... forth in corporeal vastness, and appears childish and unnatural, like the giants of a story-book. The Greeks believed in the gods and heroes whose agency and exploits constituted the machinery of tragedy, but the Romans did not, and we cannot sympathize with them, because we see that they are insincere. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and alarm in the United States. The free navigation of the Mississippi became daily of more importance, and it was apprehended that the French would not be found as peaceable neighbours as the Spaniards. Every one remembers the short and uneasy existence of the insincere peace of Amiens. A renewal of the war was seen to be inevitable, and the American cabinet perceived that, in such an event, France would postpone the occupation of Louisiana. This state of things was justly thought to be favourable to an arrangement with France ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... its finest and most intricate convolutions, was of the very essence of religion. No one, however, can read his account of his own feelings, even when he runs into the accustomed phraseology, without perceiving the ring of genuine feeling. He is morbid, it may be, but he is not insincere; and even his strained hyperboles are scarcely unintelligible when considered as the expression of the sentiment produced by the effort of a human being to live constantly in presence of the absolute ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
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