FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • More 'Insouciance' Quotes from Famous Books

... the English statesmen, Castlereagh, Wellington, and Canning. Much injustice has been done to the first of these. For many critics have been misled by Byron's denunciation of Castlereagh, just as others have spoken lightly of the stubborn conservatism of Wellington, or the easy and half-cynical insouciance of the author of the Anti-Jacobin. As a matter of fact, Castlereagh was by no means an opponent of the principles of the Holy Alliance. He joined with Russia, Austria, and Prussia as a not unwilling member of the successive Congresses, but both he and Wellington, true to their national instincts, ...

— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... that I have altered very little—hardly at all, in fact! The little thing, whatever it is, that sits at the heart of the machine, the speck of soul-stuff that is really ME, is very much the same creature, neither old nor young; confident, imperturbable, with a strange insouciance of its own, knowing what it has to do. I have done many things, gathered many impressions, ransacked experience, enjoyed, suffered; but whatever I have argued, expressed, tried to believe, aimed at, hoped, feared, has hardly affected that central core of life at all. And I feel ...

— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... creek. Just at leaving, an old black man and two lads made their appearance. This old party was remarkably shy; the elder boy seemed a little frightened, and didn't relish being touched by a white man, but the youngest was quite at his ease, and came up to me with the audacity and insouciance of early youth, and pulled me about. When I patted him, he grinned like any other monkey. None of them were handsome; the old man was so monkey-like—he would have charmed the heart of Professor Darwin. ...

— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... some extraordinary influence—whether it were the oddity of William Harewood's face, or the novelty of his perfect insouciance in the household whither care had come only too early—some infection seized on the young Underwoods, and before the end of the evening meal, if the 'goings on' were not equal to those in the precincts, they were, at any rate, not ...

— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... minister. Behind the scenes George was active and anxious, while in parliament the weapons of indignation and sarcasm with which North was assailed failed to pierce the impenetrable wall of his amiable insouciance. The king's policy was triumphant. The combination between the obedient responsible minister and the imperious irresponsible king lasted for twelve years, during which George ...

— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... her insouciance she thrust out her arm, giving the shining white perambulator a running push from the rear, so that it went rolling lightly from her and with a perfect gear action down the slight incline of sidewalk. They were after it at a bound, light-heeled and ...

— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... and wiped it carefully with the lower side of his sleeve, round and round. He placed it on his head, jauntily. He stepped to the kitchen, took a tooth-pick from the little red-and-white glass holder on the table, and—with this emblem of insouciance, at an angle of ninety, between his teeth—strolled indolently, nonchalantly down the front steps, along the cement walk to the street and so toward town. The two old people, left alone in the sudden silence of ...

— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away ...

— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... flutter of applause ran round the tables. Lanyard mastered a sense of daze that he saw reflected in the opening eyes of the woman as she slipped from his arms. In an instant they were themselves once more, two completely self-contained children of sophistication, with superb insouciance making nothing of their public triumph in a rare ...

— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... however, apparent in his manner on alighting. He bore a countenance of amiable insouciance through the portals of this festal institution whose proudest boast and—incidentally—sole claim to uniquity is that it never opens its doors before midnight nor ...

— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent ...

— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... perversity make it inevitable, we must unite our utmost strength, not alone to console each other, but to snatch from that "sombre dcouragement"(309) you so well foresee, the wilful, but ever fondly-loved dupe of his own insouciance. ...

— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... to Deir el-Bahari occasioned more laughter and little screams and offers of help from the sterner male, who, under an extreme insouciance, tried to hide the insecurity of his perch on the back ...

— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... vergers did not march up the choir to the return stalls, but divided and formed up in two lines at the entrance, making a dignified avenue down which the choristers and the clergy passed with calm insouciance into the full view of the waiting congregation. Only two picked men, with wands of silver, preceded the dignitaries to their massive stalls. Mr. Thrush was—though not in Robin's eyes—an ordinary verger. He would not therefore ...

— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... strange juxtaposition to his unequalled comprehension of national political problems was a surprising streak of frank insouciance and happy-hearted boyishness, which frequently expressed itself in the open defiance of authority in the shape of his great-aunt Maud, his slightly dropsical mother (nee Sheila Soddle) and his two resident cousins, Alexander Chaffinch and Dorothy Bonk, who at moments were entirely ...

— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... Friday, that Mary's "little friends" caught her red-handed, in an escapade that explained everything from the size of her trunk to the puzzling insouciance of her manner. They all, and particularly Roberta, had begun to feel a little hurt as the days went by and Mary indulged in many mysterious absences and made unconvincing excuses for refusing invitations that, as Katherine Kittredge ...

— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... content until he had found his way into the most exhausting and hazardous branch of the whole job. He said, again and again, that he would rather be a sergeant with the 69th than a lieutenant with any other outfit. There was a heart of heroism in the "elfin sprite." The same dashing insouciance that dictated the weekly article for his paper when in hospital with three broken ribs after being run down by a train was hardened and steeled in the sergeant who nightly tore his uniform into ribbons by crawling out through the ...

— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... can stand it, and to face such chances requires the buoyancy and hope of youth. Whatever the cause they were all lovely creatures, just like our guardsmen, numbers tall and slender and thin through, and many of them might have been the Eton eleven or Oxford eight, and all with the insouciance and careless grace I have already told ...

— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... his every gesture; a new sonorousness rang in his voice; a simple and manly pomposity marked his very walk as he passed from curio to curio. And when he fearlessly handled the box of rats and hammered upon it with cool insouciance, he beheld—for the first time in his life—a purl of admiration eddying in Marjorie's lovely eye, a certain softening of that eye. And then Verman spake and Penrod was forgotten. Marjorie's eye rested ...

— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... what you're driving at," said the burglar, with a dark frown. "It's the same old story. Your innocence and childish insouciance is going to lead me back into an honest life. Every time I crack a crib where there's a kid around, ...

— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... insouciance gaining with his discomposure, her eyes widening and then a dolly kind of glassiness seeming to set in. "You ...

— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... document, following the Yang Tu pamphlet, would have led to riot and tumult. In China, the home of pacifism, the politicians and people bowed their heads and bided their time. Even foreign circles in China were somewhat nonplussed by the insouciance displayed by the peripatetic legal authority; and the Memorandum was for many days spoken of as an unnecessary indiscretion.[16] Fastening at once on the point to which Yang Tu had ascribed such importance—the ...

— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... business and the excitement of responsibility are indispensable to me, and I believe that I am never happier than when I have more to think of and to do than I can manage in a given period'. Idleness and insouciance had few temptations for them, cynicism was abhorrent to them. Even Thackeray was perpetually 'caught out' when he assumed the cynic's pose. Charlotte Bronte, most loyal of his admirers and critics, speaks of the 'deep feelings for his kind' which he cherished ...

— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore