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More "Scoffer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respect to the Catholics of Silesia presented an honourable contrast to the policy which, under very similar circumstances, England long followed with respect to the Catholics of Ireland. Every form of religion and irreligion found an asylum in the States. The scoffer whom the parliaments of France had sentenced to a cruel death, was consoled by a commission in the Prussian service. The Jesuit who could show his face nowhere else, who in Britain was still subject to penal laws, who was proscribed by France, Spain, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... petticoats, and a knot of ribbon at the point of the tightly-fitting corselet bodice. Any Parisian meeting the Baroness on the boulevard would smile and condemn her outright; he does not admit any plea of extenuating circumstances, like a modern jury on a case of fratricide. A scoffer is always superficial, and in consequence cruel; the rascal never thinks of throwing the proper share of ridicule on society that made the individual what he is; for Nature only makes dull animals of us, we owe the fool to ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... He was red-blooded, but at the same time his heart was clean. Once more he found himself contrasting the honest-eyed, pure-hearted Ruth with this sensual scoffer. There was no denying the physical appeal of the lithe, sinuous Russian; there was no gainsaying the call of the blood. On the other hand, the American girl stood for everything his own mother exemplified in flesh ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... they were especially beautiful, the deep basses of the men mingling with the altos and thin sopranos of the women and forming a combination of sound that irresistibly reminded one of an organ. In fact, "kanaka organ" is the scoffer's description of the himine. On the other hand, some of the chants or ballads were very barbaric, having come down ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... sun rose on our army in motion. You say that I am a scoffer. I didn't scoff at that spectacle. We were on Flint Hill; and, as far as we could see around us, the whole world was fairly crawling with troops. Over them a rainbow hung. Later ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... slave. If, O Mandhatri, thou wishest for an eternal life (of felicity), live as a king should that does not indulge in these two, viz., Pride and Unrighteousness! Abstain from companionship with him that is intoxicated (with pride), him that is heedless (of the dictates of honesty), him that is a scoffer of religion, him that is insensate, and forbear to pay court to all of them when united. Keep thyself aloof from the company of ministers whom thou hast once punished and especially of women, as also from mountains ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... strange, therefore, that of all biography in the world that of Jesus Christ should be least understood. It is an exception to all the world has ever seen. 'The world knew Him not.' There is, to be sure, a simple grandeur about the life of Jesus which awes almost every mind. The most hardened scoffer, after he has jested and jeered at everything in the temple of Christianity, stands for a moment uncovered and breathless when he comes to the object of its adoration and feels how awful goodness is, and Virtue in her shape how lovely. Yet, after all, the character of the Christ ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... covering them, every soul, with the two great revolvers in his hands. For Pete Sweeney was not drunk now. As swiftly as that horrible thing had been done he had gone sober. Yet no man who saw him that instant feared him one whit less. Not a man present, believer or scoffer, but breathed a silent prayer. And there was reason. If Pete Sweeney, Long Pete, had possessed a real friend on earth, he possessed that one no more. Disciples he had, imitators a-plenty; but friends—there had been but one, and now there was none. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... with the friars, seeing that they were the veriest vagabonds that be; a friar thereupon took the jest in very ill part, and could not refrain himself from calling the fellow ribald, villain, and the son of perdition; whereat the jester became a scoffer indeed, for he could play a part in that play, no man better, making the friar more foolishly ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Professor if it came to an array of facts concerning the probable uses of the gigantic table, and when I glanced at the Kanaka, as he stopped to listen to the scientist's discourse, I felt inclined to agree with the scoffer. Soma had an intelligence that lifted him above his class, and I was convinced that many of the Professor's surmises caused ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... a scoffer," the other reproached him, and his rascally face was oddly grave. "You ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... him, even after he had removed to Brighton that he might live looking out upon the sea, which appealed to and soothed him. I never met a man who seemed to weigh so carefully every action, every word—even the pettiest—and so completely to find guidance through his own conscience. He was no scoffer in religious matters. In the domain of theology, however, he had little regard for decorum. It was to him a very faulty system hindering true growth, and the idea of rewards and punishments struck him as an appeal to very low natures indeed. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... scooped up a handful of sand and threw it at the scoffer. Herb ducked adroitly and the sand passed over his head and fell full on Jimmy's mouth, which at the moment ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... name in levity again, thou scoffer, or even your years may prove a feeble protection!" said a stern, startling voice from behind. All eyes turned involuntarily at the unexpected sounds, and the muscular form of the Pilot was seen resuming its attitude of repose ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... God!" The Last Crusader cried, "And art Thou careless of Thine own? For us Thy Son in Salem died, And Salem is the scoffer's throne! ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... and disappointed being of mine there is a child hidden—a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not a scoffer say, 'See how Christians cast away the law of God!' They are under the law to Christ; bound by the most sacred obligations to obey all its requirements; not to merit pardon, but to prove, to the comfort of their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "Oh, quite. More than convinced. I never should question them. Mine is the fate of the scoffer. The most rabid persecutor is merely the reverse side of the bigoted proselyter. Upon me rests not the curse that follows the tolerant. They get nowhere. 'Because thou art neither hot nor cold I spew ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Any one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of most other countries. Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer. The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world. Despite all this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral superiority, and loses no chance of proclaiming ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... no scoffer, had small intimacy with ghosts; and Roy's frequented other regions; nor was he in the frame of mind to induce spiritual visitations. Soul and body were enmeshed, as in a network of sunbeams, holding ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... dispute. The world, he is fond of saying, is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. 'I have never yet seen or heard,' he says, 'anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... same beam glitters on the blessed Altar of the faithful, and on the cell of the impenitent murderer. Look at the sunshine and the shower in the country. The fields of the earnest, prayerful man, and those of the unbelieving, prayerless scoffer lie golden under the same sunlight, are watered by the same showers. And why is this so? Surely it is a type of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Surely it teaches us the wondrous height, and depth, and breadth of divine love. It warns us not to ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... was a man mete for nothynge but to scoffe and ieste; but yet with his mery toyes, he so moued the sayd Can, that he dydde greatly enryche hym. And, bycause Dantes dispised his foolysshenes, this scoffer sayd to hym: how cometh it, Dantes, that thou art helde[273] so wyse and so well lerned, and yet arte poore and nedy? I am an vnlerned man and am an ignorant fole, and yet I am farre richer than thou art. To whom Dantes answered: ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities —but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn't laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way to classify ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the Suitors toward such a view? Eurymachus is the name of their speaker now, manifestly a representative man of their kind. He derides the prophet: "Go home, old man, and forecast for thy children!" He is a scoffer and skeptic; truly a spokesman of the Suitors in their relation to the Gods, in whom they can have no living faith; through long wickedness they imagine that there is no retribution, they have come ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... a touch of Johnson's vigor:—"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr. Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... yet never could it have arisen without some creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,—all the more horrid, the grander its dress! That is not ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... man who afterward begat seven healthy children. But Klok-No-Ton! They shuddered with dire foreboding at thought of him, and each one felt himself the centre of accusing eyes, and looked accusingly upon his fellows—each one and all, save Sime, and Sime was a scoffer whose evil end was destined with a certitude ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... and the drawers of the land, No whit behind the mighty and the great, Bearing unmoved the burden of the State,— Alike each duty challenged at man's hand. Life is built up of smallest atomics, Pile upon pile the ramparts still increase, And as those, Roman walls, o'er which in scorn The scoffer leapt, soon held the world at bay, So shall thy deeds of duty, lowly born, Be thy strong tower and glory ere the ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... intercession of Saint Francis d'Assise." Of course, the missioners saw water-monsters in the Congo River. A child "came from his mother's womb with a beard and all his teeth, perhaps to show he was born into the world grown old in vice." A certain scoffer "being one day to pass a river with two companions, was visibly taken up by an invisible hand into the air. One of his companions, going to take hold of him by the feet, had such a cuff given him that he fell down in the boat, and the offender was seen ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... from Bunker Hill, so that the intervention of the storm seemed peculiarly providential. When Washington issued his order, months before, for the strict observance of the Sabbath and daily religious service by the army, General Lee, who was a godless scoffer, remarked, derisively, "God is on the side ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... Pentaur, looking kindly at the old man. "But you, you everlasting scoffer—you look pale. How ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is not of much use talking in this wise to a scoffer. He that maun to Cupar maun to Cupar. We're all in the same express ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Bertie was only a lip-deep scoffer. Her heart was open to conviction yet, and, when the time came, I believed that the seed sown in old days would germinate and bear good harvest. All ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... several days, until every penny was exhausted. Then he would make demands at home for more money, which if refused, he was sure to abuse his wife and family. He was not only a drunkard; he was a scoffer at religion, and considered it a mark of honor to take the name of ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... "You are a scoffer, Kaunitz," said the empress. "Your Creator is very merciful to allow you time to utter the unchristian sentiments which are forever falling from your lips. But God sees the heart of man, and He knows that yours is better than your words. Since the loving, all-suffering Lord ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... pining for her love, she will pity him, see his good qualities, and love him. And if, when Benedick thinks we don't know he is listening, we say how sad it is that the beautiful Beatrice should be in love with a heartless scoffer like Benedick, he will certainly be on his knees before her in a ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... was it in the drama which was of deepest significance to the author himself? The answer is to be found in the title, with its allusion to the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles of the journey of Saul, the persecutor, the scoffer, who, on his way to Damascus, had an awe-inspiring vision, which converted Saul, the hater of Christ, into Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. Strindberg's drama describes the progress of the author right up to his conversion, shows how stage by stage he relinquishes worldly ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... approached the young scoffer, his hand on an exact level with the latter's ear, his right foot raised to indicate a possible means of enforcing ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... cannibal; where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the same tray with the pander and the procuress; where the professional religionist, the learned Koranist, and the strictest moralist consort with the wicked magician, the scoffer, and the debauchee-poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor, and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." The whole ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Bob scooped up a handful of sand and threw it at the scoffer. Herb ducked adroitly and the sand passed over his head and fell full on Jimmy's mouth, which at the moment ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... young man utter a similar phrase and in such an accent. The image returned to him, by way of contrast, of Dorsenne, alert and foppish, the dandy of literature, so gayly a scoffer and a sophist, to whom antique and venerable Rome was only a city of pleasure, a cosmopolis more paradoxical than Florence, Nice, Biarritz, St. Moritz, than such and such other cities of international winter and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... society may be, not the corrupt, but those who have held back the righteous leaven, the salt that has lost its savor, the innocent who have not even the moral courage to show what they think of the effrontery of impurity,—the serious, who yet timidly succumb before some loud-voiced scoffer,—the heart trembling all over with religious sensibilities that yet suffers itself through false shame to be beaten down into outward and practical acquiescence by some rude and ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... the poor, of education, and of the Kirk, remained a dead letter. The Duke, Arran, Lord James, and a few barons, including the ruffian Andrew Ker of Faldonside, with Glencairn and Ochiltree, signed it, in token of approval, but little came of it all. Lethington, probably, was the scoffer who styled these provisions "devout imaginations." The nobles and lairds, many of them, were converted, in matter of doctrine; in conduct they were the most avaricious, bloody, and treacherous of all the generations which ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... his present softened state of feeling, sensitive to everything, this inevitable act of hypocrisy was not merely painful to Levin, it seemed to him utterly impossible. Now, in the heyday of his highest glory, his fullest flower, he would have to be a liar or a scoffer. He felt incapable of being either. But though he repeatedly plied Stepan Arkadyevitch with questions as to the possibility of obtaining a certificate without actually communicating, Stepan Arkadyevitch maintained that it was out ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of all biography in the world that of Jesus Christ should be least understood. It is an exception to all the world has ever seen. 'The world knew Him not.' There is, to be sure, a simple grandeur about the life of Jesus which awes almost every mind. The most hardened scoffer, after he has jested and jeered at everything in the temple of Christianity, stands for a moment uncovered and breathless when he comes to the object of its adoration and feels how awful goodness is, and Virtue in her shape how lovely. Yet, after all, the character ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... I, is your time come; and you will be no longer, I hope, an infidel either to the power or excellence of the sex you have pretended hitherto so much as undervalue; nor a ridiculer or scoffer at an institution which all sober people reverence, and all rakes, sooner or later, are brought to reverence, or ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... rebellion was at an end. Charlie prayed briefly, but fervently. After that there was no more trouble but many of the boys had somewhat fallen from grace before school ended. Yet they kept up their devotional exercises without any urging on my part. Mr. Hurlbut was something of a scoffer at religion and my prompt action with his boy made me extremely popular ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... rewarded enough," said Pentaur, looking kindly at the old man. "But you, you everlasting scoffer—you look pale. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... frequent ravines, over which a horse can move but slowly and painfully, it is the surest, the quickest, and indeed the only means of intercommunication. I am delighted to testify to these things, because I had formerly been a scoffer. ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... about the same people. In my experiences, the world is by no means the cold-hearted and selfish thing he deems it; and yet I suppose, Lady Maude, if there were to be a verdict given upon us both, nine out of ten would have fixed on me as the scoffer. Is ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... with temporary Compunction, and in his last Scenes; which could not have been made, had either of them been painted as sentimental Unbelievers. Not to say, that Clarissa, whose great Objection to Mr. Wyerly was, that he was a Scoffer, must have been inexcusable had she known Lovelace to be so, and had given the least attention to his Addresses. On the contrary, thus she comforts herself, when she thinks she must be his—'This one consolation, however, remains: He is not an Infidel, an Unbeliever. ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... being in such a fearful state of mind about it; but as it's only mine, you know, I'm sure it really doesn't matter." And then they'd only go off worse than ever,—mother doing hysterics, and so forth—and say I was a wicked, bad, abominable scoffer, and that it made them horribly frightened even to listen to me. As if I wasn't more likely to know the real value of my own ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... less to be threatened, as you threaten it, with infinite and eternal misery by I know not what necessary laws of Zeus, and to be put off at last with some myth or other about Prometheus. Surely your mother bare you a scoffer and pitiless, Socrates, and not, as you boast, a man-midwife ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... and his heart clave to him as if he had been his own son. And when he himself escaped from the sons of Belial, which was not until they had tired themselves with reviling, and with idle reproach, and the jests of the scoffer, Joshua, my brother, returned to them once and again, to give ransom for the youth called Darsie Latimer, with offers of money and with promise of remission, but they would not hearken to him. Also, he went before the head judge, whom men call the sheriff, and would have told him of the youth's ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... been talking, rather bitterly as well as floridly, about sighting the cold Northern Star and losing the Southern Cross. I lay back and gloated over the starry picture overhead through a crisscross picture-mount of ragged grass. I left the confutation of the scoffer to Miss Moore. There was an edge on many of her remarks that night, and I could trust her to deal with him. But what she said I have forgotten. Only I remember that he gave her best at last. Then, and not till then, I broke silence, submitting ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... mark of regret. He even showed me letters that had passed between them, and in which every horrid and immoral tenet was defended by one and denied by the other. These letters showed Colden as the advocate of suicide; a scoffer at promises; the despiser of revelation, of Providence and a future state; an opponent of marriage, and as one who denied (shocking!) that any thing but mere habit and positive law stood in the way of marriage, nay, of intercourse without marriage, between brother ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... in scorn the heathen scoffer Answered: "I disdain thine offer; Neither fear I God nor Devil; Thee ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... others heard this, there needed nothing farther; but they pushed forward by main force and fell a-crying out and saying, 'Seize yonder traitor and scoffer at God and His saints, who, being whole of his body, hath come hither, in the guise of a cripple, to make mock of us and of our saint!' So saying, they laid hold of Martellino and pulled him down from the place where he ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... impulse, yet full of the energies and visions of genius, this arrogant stripling passes by quick leaps from boyhood into the vices of age, and, after a short experience of the worst side of life, comes out a scoffer and a misanthrope, fills the world with his gospel of desperation and despair, and, after preaching disgust of existence and contempt of mankind as the wisdom gleaned from his excesses, he dies, worn out and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in his pleasures. He was governed by his favorites and his women. He had not sufficient moral elevation to be earnest in any thing, even to be a bigot in religion. He vacillated between the infidelity of Hobbes and the superstitions of Rome. He lived a scoffer, and died a Catholic. His temper was easy, but so easy as not to prevent the persecution and ruin of his best supporters, when they had become odious to the nation. If he was incapable of enmity, he was also incapable of friendship. If he hated no one with long-continued malignity, it was only because ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... perfectly willing that his world should see in him an incorrigible scoffer at moral conventions. He rather enjoyed being the object of maternal warnings to young daughters, but in financial affairs no stern moralist could have been more observant of rigid integrity, and in that, ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... would gain respect, let him be a boaster or braggart; if one would be godly, and attend church and approach the altar, he is dubbed a hypocrite, if he abstain from doing so, he becomes at once an antichrist or a heretic; if he is light-hearted, he is called a scoffer, if silent, a morose cur; if he practises honesty, he is but a good-for-nothing fool; if well dressed, he is proud, if not, he is a pig; if gentle of speech, he is double-faced and a rogue, whom none can fathom; if rough, he is an arrogant and froward devil. This is the world you make so ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... some worthy and ingenious persons, that if Lovelace had been drawn an infidel or scoffer, his character, according to the taste of the present worse than sceptical age, would have been more natural. It is, however, too well known, that there are very many persons, of his cast, whose actions discredit their belief. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... act without control; I ne'er have cherished hate for such as thee. Of all the spirits who deny, The scoffer is least wearisome to me. Ever too prone is man activity to shirk, In unconditioned rest he fain would live; Hence this companion purposely I give, Who stirs, excites, and must, as devil, work. But ye, the genuine sons of heaven, rejoice! In the full ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... by the genial certainty in this answer, said: "I thank you, sir. I shall go back and refute that common scoffer, that caster of doubts. I have seen the Truth face, to face, and am greatly encouraged to further public effort. With many apologies I can now get out," he added, as the train stopped at South Croydon. "Blink!" And, followed by his dog, he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with the chue, chue of the House-Sparrow, so exactly imitated in every respect that were it not for what follows, no one would suppose it to be any other bird. It is called a Mocking-Bird here, and it well deserves the name, for it is a real scoffer at the sorrows of other birds, which it laughs to scorn and turns into ridicule by parodying them so exactly. I never heard it attempt to imitate any of the Larks or Thrushes, although I have listened to ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... conversion of many. Thus we find St. Justin, the martyr, all his life long glorying in the name of philosopher, and continuing to wear, even after his conversion, the philosopher's cloak so much derided by the scoffer, Lucian. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Hush, scoffer; ere you sound your puny thunder, List to their aims, and bow your ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... resumed their journey, the relationship between them had undergone a change; nay, you might have said that their characters were also changed. For Tom found himself pouring out his turbulent heart to Kenelm, confiding to this philosophical scoffer at love all the passionate humanities of love,—its hope, its anguish, its jealousy, its wrath,—the all that links the gentlest of emotions to tragedy and terror. And Kenelm, listening tenderly, with softened eyes, uttered not one cynic word,—nay, not one playful jest. He, felt that the gravity ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all that. But I don't know if you're calling it justice. I'm not myself. It isn't my tally. Blasphemy? I lave it with you. A scoffer, am I? So be it. The Lord's licked me, and I've had enough. But I'm not going down on my knees for it, anyway. The Almighty and ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... through which it flowed. Much was said of the love and tender mercy of God, but the fact that he is also a just God, and will in nowise clear the guilty, was set aside as a hard doctrine. The gay scoffer, the one who despises Christ's tender offers of love and pardon, provided he is amiable and pleasant among his friends and associates, must not be given over to a just retribution. God is too loving a Father to see such a lovely scorner perish. It is "so incongruous" to think of the one with whom ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... automobilistic is not very sincerely a scoffer at heart. It is mostly a case of "sour grapes," and he only waits the propitious combination of circumstances which shall permit him to become a possessor of a motor-car himself. This is not a very difficult procedure. It simply means that he ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... calmly now I still hold to my attitude concerning style. I love a book written in fine style, but I refuse to impose style on children. In every child there is a gigantic protest. Thus the son of praying parents often turns out to be a scoffer. I had a good instance of the danger ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... deepest spring, and from this universality, the leading component of Humor, arise the mildness and forbearance of the humorist toward the individual, who is lost in the mass of little consequence; this also distinguishes the Humorist from the Scoffer. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... fatal to others. His controversial daring is backed by his bodily prowess; and by bringing his intellectual pretensions boldly into a line with his physical accomplishments, he, indeed, presents a very formidable front to the sceptic or the scoffer. Take a cubit from his stature, and his whole manner resolves itself into an impertinence. But with that addition, he overcrows the town, browbeats their prejudices, and bullies them out of their senses, and is not afraid of being contradicted by any one less than himself. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... two devils from a man who afterward begat seven healthy children. But Klok-No-Ton! They shuddered with dire foreboding at thought of him, and each one felt himself the centre of accusing eyes, and looked accusingly upon his fellows—each one and all, save Sime, and Sime was a scoffer whose evil end was destined with a certitude ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... us go back to our story. Of the neighbours, as I have stated already, Alexey Sergeitch saw little; and they did not care much for him, called him a queer fish, stuck up, and a scoffer, and even a 'martiniste' who recognised no authorities, though they had no clear idea of the meaning of this term. To a certain extent the neighbours were right: Alexey Sergeitch had lived in his Suhodol ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love, for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... in Mr. Barlow's "Vision"; but he closes the chapter sadly, with a touch of Johnson's vigor:—"The annals of American literature are short and simple. The history of poverty is usually neither very various nor very interesting." Farther South the voice of the scoffer was heard. Mr. Robert Morris ventured to say in the Assembly of Pennsylvania, that America had not as yet produced a good poet. Great surprise and indignation, when this speech reached the eyes of the Connecticut ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... asking, "Who is this stranger pitying this vile thing?" Then one exclaimed, with awe-abated breath, "This surely is the Man of Nazareth; This must be Jesus, for none else but he Something to praise in a dead dog could see!" And, being ashamed, each scoffer bowed his head, And from the sight of ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... also dwelled an other Florentyne, that hadde neyther lernynge nor prudence, and was a man mete for nothynge but to scoffe and ieste; but yet with his mery toyes, he so moued the sayd Can, that he dydde greatly enryche hym. And, bycause Dantes dispised his foolysshenes, this scoffer sayd to hym: how cometh it, Dantes, that thou art helde[273] so wyse and so well lerned, and yet arte poore and nedy? I am an vnlerned man and am an ignorant fole, and yet I am farre richer than thou art. To whom Dantes answered: if I may fynde a ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... le Cure de Ste. Agatha, though the priestly calling seemed all they had in common. The first was small of stature, thin of face, looking like a mediaeval, though he was a modern, saint; the other tall, well filled out like an epicure, yet not even Bonhomme Careau, the nearest approach to a scoffer in the two parishes, ever went so far as to call the Cure of Ste. Agatha by such an undeserved name, since the good, fat priest had the glaring fault of stinginess which all the country knew but never mentioned. They loved him too much to mention his faults. He was good to the sick ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... he came near. Her eyes greeted him with welcome, and followed him with fond pleasure. "Ah, if she could have had a son like that, how she would have loved him!" "Wait," says Conscience, the dark scoffer mocking within her, "wait, Beatrix Esmond! You know you will weary of this inclination, as you have of all. You know, when the passing fancy has subsided, that the boy may perish, and you won't have a tear for him; or talk, and you weary of his stories; and that ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thought of his family, of the sorrows and dangers about them and of the difficulties surrounding his return to them. . . . As though under the spell of the melody, little by little, he descended the stairs. What an artist's soul that haughty scoffer had! . . . At first sight, the Germans with their rough exterior and their discipline which made them commit the greatest atrocities, gave one a wrong impression. One had to live intimately with them to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, Maugredie, a man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist and a scoffer, with the scalpel for his one article of faith. He would consider, as a concession to Brisset, that a man who, as a matter of fact, was perfectly well was dead, and recognize with Cameristus that a man might be living on after his apparent demise. He found ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... was always resentful of long words. "Be silent, you black scoffer, and do not allude to such disgraceful things in the presence of respectable people! For I am a decent Christian woman, I would have you understand. But everybody knows your reputation! and a very fit companion you are for that scamp yonder! and ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... profit. When that profit comes, no matter how small it may be, I'll sell and sell quick, but not sooner.... But there, I've profaned the Lord's day long enough. I came over here this mornin' to visit Julia's grave. There was a scoffer in our pulpit, that young whippersnapper from Wapatomac had exchanged with our minister and I didn't care to ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... scoffer at faith goes about Pouring into the ears of his fellows each doubt Which assails him. One truth he fails wholly to heed; That a doubt oft repeated may ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and pretended to think she had proved all and a great deal more than she wanted to prove; but his exaggeration, and the way he rung all the changes on two or three of the points she had made at Mrs. Burrage's, were just the sign that he was a scoffer of scoffers. He wouldn't do anything but laugh; he seemed to think that he might laugh at her all day without her taking offence. Well, he might if it amused him; but she didn't see why she should ramble round New York with him ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Church and the Bar. The idea, however, proved—impracticable—which, in some respects, is rather a pity. It has seemed to me that a man who can work off cough cures and cosmetics on to healthy folks with a hide like leather, and talk a scoffer off the field, ought to have made his ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... as Bluff says; and—yes, that's blood on the ground, as sure as you live! I guess I'm on the wrong track. He did have a merry circus. He did shoot an elk, but where has the blooming thing gone?" exclaimed the scoffer. ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... without a creed, yet never could it have arisen without some creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,—all the more horrid, the grander its dress! That ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... which we inhabit we are come upon evil day's. The rage of the blasphemer, the laugh at the scoffer, the heartless lip-service of the worldling, and the light dalliance of the daughters of music, are offered every hour upon a thousand Baal-altars within this very parish. I would ask some of you who spend your evenings in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... attention. Holman remarked in a whisper that Soma could probably outpoint the Professor if it came to an array of facts concerning the probable uses of the gigantic table, and when I glanced at the Kanaka, as he stopped to listen to the scientist's discourse, I felt inclined to agree with the scoffer. Soma had an intelligence that lifted him above his class, and I was convinced that many of the Professor's ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... to discuss the supernatural in any form or shape, his one object being to improve human conduct in this life, without attempting to probe that state from which man is divided by death. At the same time, he was no scoffer; for although he declared that "the study of the supernatural is injurious indeed," and somewhat cynically bade his followers "show respect to spiritual beings, but keep them at a distance," yet in another passage we read: "He who offends against God has no one to whom he can pray." ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... was a Berber. He was succeeded by a full-blooded black, Mohammed Abou Bekr, who had been his prime minister. Mohammed was hailed as "Askia" (usurper) and is best known as Mohammed Askia. He was strictly orthodox where Ali was rather a scoffer, and an organizer where Ali was a warrior. On his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1495 there was nothing of the barbaric splendor of Mansa Musa, but a brilliant group of scholars and holy men with a small escort of fifteen hundred soldiers and nine hundred thousand dollars in gold. He stopped ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... not that Don Federico, the young advocate, well known in the coffee-houses as a virulent Exaltado, a determined scoffer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... hearts. I think there is scarcely a boarding student who is not thoroughly aroused. Most are seeking the Saviour. Eighteen have found peace. Many day students, and others who are not students, have been much interested. One young man who has been a scoffer at all good things, came to the meetings, and soon came under the influence and asked us to pray for him. As I write in Stone Hall, I hear on all sides the sound of prayer ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 2, February, 1889 • Various
... the fact remains as Atheist puts it. As Atheist in this book says, so the Atheist who is in our hearts often says: We are like to have nothing for all our pains but a lifetime of tedious travel. Yes, wherever the blame lies, there can be no doubt about it, that what this hilarious scoffer calls the tediousness of the way is but a too common experience among many of those who, tediousness and all, will still cleave fast to it and will never ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... spring, the feeble a staff, and the victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of music; and as long as each man asks on account of his wants, and asks what he wants, no man will discover aught amiss or deficient in the vast and many-chambered storehouse. But if, instead of this, an idler or scoffer should wander through the rooms, peering and peeping, and either detects, or fancies he has detected, here a rusted sword or pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction, and superseded by later ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Scotland, where the proceedings were being opened by prayer, and the reverend gentleman prayed fervently that "the Liberals might hang a' thegither." He was interrupted by a loud and irreverent "Amen" from the back of the hall. "Not, O Lord," went on the clergyman, "in the sense which that profane scoffer would have ye to understand, but that they may hang thegither in accord and concord." "I dinna care so much what kind of a cord it is," struck in the voice, "sae lang as it is ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... in the various Gray lawsuits is sifted out, there appear to have been three distinctly different Grays: first, Gray the SCOFFER, who examined Bell's telephone at the Centennial and said it was "nothing but the old lover's telegraph. It is impossible to make a practical speaking telephone on the principle shown by Professor Bell.... The currents are too ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... guidance of her destinies—it must be by the efforts of men who, like yourself, see your way to the combination of the practice of the Church with the spirit of science. Understand that all the younger men of science whom I know intimately are ESSENTIALLY of my way of thinking. (I know not a scoffer or an irreligious or an immoral man among them, but they all regard orthodoxy as you do Brahmanism.) Understand that this new school of the prophets is the only one that can work miracles, the only one that can constantly appeal to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... from the very first, its own best prophet, and step by step it has foretold the progress it would make. It comes, too, most triumphant. No faith before it ever took so victorious a stand in its infancy. It has swept like a hurricane of fire through the land, compelling faith from the baffled scoffer ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... rank, who objected to each statement that fell from his lips, thus interfering seriously with the effect of his peroration. If the Irishman had been more convincing, I suppose the crowd would have silenced the scoffer, for these little matters of discipline are always attended to by the audience; but the Scotchman's points were too well taken; he was so trenchant, in fact, at times, that a voice would cry, 'Coom up, Sandy, an' 'ave it all ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and traitorous idea. A smart notion," vociferated the clerk, "thrown out as an apple of discord. But it is just. You are a scoffer, a man of the world, a cavalry officer, and, though not without brains, you do not realize how profound is your thought, nor how true. Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his empire over humanity ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... missionary reports or in attacks on them. They are not converted in the least. A really converted African is a very beautiful form of Christian; but those Africans who are the chief mainstay of missionary reports and who afford such material for the scoffer thereat, have merely had the restraint of fear removed from their minds in the mission schools without the greater restraint of love ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss. He is not with us, and he is ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the famous maxim of the Doctrinaires, that Reason is sovereign, and not king or people; and it was further exposed to the scoffer by the promise of Comte that Positivist philosophers shall manufacture political ideas, which no man shall be permitted to dispute. But putting aside international and criminal law, in which there is some approach to uniformity, the domain of political economy seems destined ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... she echoed, firing up at once. "I suppose if a fellow-mortal were on his way to the scaffold, you men would still ask for explanations. Listen to me. You're the only man here Maurice was at all friendly with—I shouldn't turn to you, you scoffer, you may be sure of it, if I knew of anyone else. He liked you; and at one time, what you said had a good deal of influence with him. It might still have. Go to him, Heinz, and talk straight to him. Make him think of his future, and of all the other ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Plonville to make two resolutions; first, to mention his scheme to no one; second, to persevere and perfect his invention, thus causing confusion to the scoffer. There were several sub-resolutions dependent on these two. He would not enter a club, he would abjure society, he would not speak to a woman—he would, in short, be a hermit until his invention stood revealed before ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... going up stream. On some of the tributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I take this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights,' as the scoffer might imagine, but from that most respectable authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays from two to three million ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... dumb—and the breezes go and come With an apathy that mocks at man's distress; Laugh, scoffer, while you may! I could bow me down and pray For an answer ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... times which that prophet had brought to pass, was practically lacking. Neither the hostility of his father to religion, nor his own experiences with the Jesuits, could, however, entirely eradicate a superstition which passed in his mind for faith. Sometimes he was a scoffer, as many with weak convictions are; but in general he preserved a formal and outward respect for the Church. He was, however, a stanch opponent of Roman centralization and papal pretensions. His theoretical ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... gone, well-nigh healed of his wound, healed also of his love, I trust, at least headed off from it. M. de Fontelles was gone also, on that quest of his which made my Lord Rochester so merry; indeed I fear that in this case the scoffer had the best of it, for he whom I have called M. de Perrencourt was certainly served again by his indignant subject, and that most brilliantly. Well, had I been a Frenchman, I could have forgiven King Louis much; and I suppose that, although ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... though there was scarcely any wind. I threw the light of my lantern steady and white across the same space. It was in a blaze of light in the midst of the blackness. A little icy thrill had gone over me at the first sound, but as it came close, I confess that my only feeling was satisfaction. The scoffer could scoff no more. The light touched his own face, and showed a very perplexed countenance. If he was afraid, he concealed it with great success, but he was perplexed. And then all that had happened ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... blessed Altar of the faithful, and on the cell of the impenitent murderer. Look at the sunshine and the shower in the country. The fields of the earnest, prayerful man, and those of the unbelieving, prayerless scoffer lie golden under the same sunlight, are watered by the same showers. And why is this so? Surely it is a type of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Surely it teaches us the wondrous height, and depth, and breadth ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... believe in the path that to-day I am treading, That I shall come safe through the dangers I'm dreading; That even the scoffer shall turn from his ways And some day be won back to trust and to praise; That the leaf on the tree and the thing we call Man Are sharing alike in His ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... "Don't think I'm a scoffer, my boy," said Sir Tom. "MTutor's a very decent fellow. Let us go and look him up. He would be better, to my thinking, if he were not quite so fine, you know. But that's a trifle, and I'm an old fogey. You are not going ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... STRANGER.—We urge you, gentle maiden, to beware of the silken enticements of the stranger, until your love is confirmed by protracted acquaintance. Shun the idler, though his coffers overflow with pelf. Avoid the irreverent—the scoffer of hallowed things; and him who "looks upon the wine while it is red;" him too, "who hath a high look and a proud heart," and who "privily slandereth his neighbor." Do not heed the specious prattle about "first love," and so place, irrevocably, the seal upon ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Another scoffer was Democritus of Abdera, who was so firmly convinced of the non-existence of ghosts that he took up his abode in a tomb and lived there night and day for a long time. Classical ghosts seem to have affected ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... and in stormy weather the old woman was seen to rise out of the woods and stir and push the clouds before her with a broom. For a hundred yards around Witch Rock the ground is still accursed, and any attempt to break it up is unavailing. Nearly a century ago a scoffer named Reynolds declared that he would run his plough through the enchanted boundary, and the neighbors watched the attempt from ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... to bring Bolingbroke into fashion. "Hear Bolingbroke upon the success of Puritanism." Hear Lovelace on Dr. Johnson; one critic would be about as edifying as the other. Bolingbroke, a sceptical writer and a scoffer at Anglican doctrine, to say nothing about his morals, allied himself for party purposes with the fanatical clergy of the Anglican Establishment, well represented by Sacheverel, and, to gratify his allies, passed as Minister ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... extract we see the optimism which runs through Carlyle's earlier writings,—the faith in creation which is to succeed destruction, the immortal hopes which sustain the soul. He believed in the God of Abraham, and was as far from being a scoffer as the heavens are higher than the earth. He had renounced historical Christianity, but he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... influenced by the memory of these boyhood glimpses into the spiritual world, or by the spirit of the scoffer and the cynic possessing me at that time, or by the still small voice that had pointed the way to safety only a few months before, I never fully knew, but I ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... des Puissance, and Asmodeus, had promised to carry off the calotte of Monsieur de Laubardemont. They were preparing for this, when the physician Duncan, a learned and upright man, but somewhat of a scoffer, took it into his head to pull a cord he discovered fastened to a column like a bell-rope, and which hung down just close to the referendary's head; whereupon they called him a Huguenot, and I am satisfied that if Marechal ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... motives that had brought most of the adventurers to the Crystal Hills; but none so vain, so foolish, and so impious too, as that of the scoffer with the prodigious spectacles. He was one of those wretched and evil men whose yearnings are downward to the darkness, instead of heavenward, and who, could they but distinguish the lights which ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is positively optimistic; there is at any rate nothing infinite in his irreverence; it touches bottom as soon as it approaches the pretty woman or the nice girl. It is such an apparition as this that really, in Gavarni, awakes the scoffer. Du Maurier is as graceful as Gavarni, but his sense of beauty conjures away almost everything save our minor vices. It is in the exploration of our major ones that Gavarni makes his principal discoveries ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... spitefullest of talkers in our town. 125 How we talk in the little town below! But love, love, love—there's better love, I know! This foolish love was only day's first offer; I choose my next love to defy the scoffer; For do not our Bride and Bridegroom sally 130 Out of Possagno church at noon? Their house looks over Orcana valley— Why should not I be the bride as soon As Ottima? For I saw, beside, Arrive last night that little bride— 135 ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... over. He leaned back and went on again, having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... my opinyn," said the leading female, "that you're a scoffer and a wretch! Your mind is in a wusser beclouded state than the poor nergoes' we are seeking to aid. You are a groper in the dark cellar of ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... whatever else besides attended his train of triumphs, and all whatever besides has lasted among Moors, and Arabs, and Turks, and Asiatics, even to this our day—constitute to a thinking mind (and it seems not without cause) another antecedent probability. Let the scoffer about Mahomet's success, and the admirer of his hotchpot Koran; let him to whom it is a stumbling-block that error (if indeed, quoth he, it be more erroneous than what Christendom counts truth) should have had such free course and been glorified, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... selfe, downe on your knees And thanke heauen, fasting, for a good mans loue; For I must tell you friendly in your eare, Sell when you can, you are not for all markets: Cry the man mercy, loue him, take his offer, Foule is most foule, being foule to be a scoffer. So take her to ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... I betray the safeguards of my honor, that thou mayest cover me with shame at will, what have I less to lose than all? Wouldst thou know more, scoffer? Shall I confess that the whole secret wisdom of our sex is but a sorry precaution for the defence of this weak fortress, which in the end is the sole object of assault by all your vows and protestations, and which (I blush to own it) is so willingly surrendered—so ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... their health?" queried a scoffer, with what he was pleased to consider fine irony. "Undoubtedly," responded the hitherto veracious one, with unabated good humour, "though perhaps one might more truthfully say they were walking less to gain an appetite than to find the means wherewith to satisfy it." He then described ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... false to the earliest and most cherished sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed, or hesitated to avow that opinion, although it may be characterized as irrational by the wise, and ridiculous by the scoffer. From my earliest recollections of serious matters, I date the entertainment of something like an ineffaceable conviction, that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and this conviction, like a word of living faith, strengthened ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... was. Most o' my money went into it an' stayed thar. Then I got a chance to tend light and ketch lobsters, an' hev stuck to it ever since. I take some comfort livin' and try an' pass it along. The widder Leach calls me a scoffer, but she allus comes to me when she's needin', an' don't allus have to cum, either. My life's been like most everybody else's—a streak o' lean an' a streak o' fat, with lean predominatin'. 'Twas a streak o' fat when I found a good woman an' she said 'yes,' an' a streak o' ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the stars, John Markham? They're a merry congregation. They're laughing at you—as I am. A sermon by moonlight with only the stars and a scoffer to listen!" ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... the court of St. James. By dint of these and kindred qualities he had become an intimate companion of the Prince of Wales. The man had a wide observation of life; indeed, he was an interested and whimsical observer rather than an actor, and a scoffer always. A libertine from the head to the heel of him, yet gossip marked him as the future husband of the beautiful young heiress Antoinette Westerleigh. For the rest, he carried an itching sword and the smoothest tongue that ever ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... are but the excrescences of our virtuous essence. If I am justly to be called a Fool then, and my folly a vice, it is because it has ever been a ruling need of my nature to be naked, and to desire to deal nakedly with my neighbours, who, to serve my ends, must themselves be unclad. Let the light scoffer understand me. I speak of the soul, and of spiritual and moral matters. All my good fortune, and I have had much, was due to my ability to indulge that spiritual urgency of mine, and to my having been dealt ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... domestic life; but as to which the finger of God, often called chance, supplies the place of human justice, and in which the moral is none the less striking and instructive because it is pointed by a scoffer. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants and a scoffer The Loves of the Triangles, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: "Hung with the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of which he studies the air and deportment characteristic of a modern Seneschal. He is a man of few words, off as well as on the stage; but his eyes flash fury if he hears his favourite Art derided by the scoffer. HORATIO SPUFFIL is also in the cast. He has dabbled in literature, but has lately abandoned such frivolity, and been elected a Member of the London County Council. A few rising Amateur Supers complete the male portion of the cast. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... strong piety, as well as of generous benevolence, animated and inspired the great and amiable man whose character is more immediately the subject of this article. It would be difficult, indeed, to think of an oratorio or requiem written by a scoffer or a sceptic. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... would fall over his eyes; then she took him firmly by the hand and they set out together. Vassie, to whom any gathering was better than none, was already gone with a girl friend; John-James, who was the Martha of the family, had too much to attend to at the farm; while Archelaus was frankly a scoffer, though an uneasy one. Neither was Annie anxious for the presence of her other children at chapel. The belief that as a judgment on her these dearly-loved ones were not to be among the saved had been growing; it was ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... thought of Goethe's completed Faust. The keynote is struck in the "Prologue in Heaven." Faust, so we hear, the daring idealist, the servant of God, is to be tempted by Mephisto, the despiser of reason, the materialistic scoffer. But we also hear, and we hear it from God's own lips, that the tempter will not succeed. God allows the devil free play, because he knows that he will frustrate his own ends. Faust will be led astray—"man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... mind that vile scoffer. Set an example to Europe, Madam, by doing what I am going to do. Marry again. Marry some good man who will be a strength and ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... subject, it is to be feared that the controversy, through the medium of a public journal, between two such highly respected controversialists, on a topic of religious practice, only gave too much occasion to the scoffer. Indeed, Johnnie Favor, the Episcopal sexton's helper, one of those persons, reputed half-witted, who sometimes make very apposite remarks, observed,—"Well—Christmas here, or Christmas there, I'm ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... the sovereign ... of women because they are often lovely, and always helpless; and of the priesthood.... Now, Childe Harold, if not absolutely craven and recreant, is at least a mortal enemy to all martial exertion, a scoffer at the fair sex, and, apparently, disposed to consider all religions as different modes of superstition." The tone of the review is severer than the Preface indicates. Nor does Byron attempt to reply to the main issue of the indictment, an unknightly aversion from war, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... best known in the world. Any one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English social life is no purer than that of most other countries. Scandals of peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the scoffer. The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world. Despite all this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral superiority, and loses ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the men-at-arms, smiled in derision. A great belief in dreams and omens was abroad in the land: and nowhere had it a more devoted adherent than in Humphrey, the Saxon serving-man, and nowhere a greater scoffer than in ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... building up the Junker dream. A court official—the Oberhofprediger—was set up, and from that time on the Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer, but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said: "If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells with jocular approval how he kept them ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... considers a determined war on all old and honored beliefs and feelings, and a substitution therefor of a vague and revolting materialism. Then come five sonnets to Pietro Aretino, the witty poet and scoffer of the Renaissance era. Aretino is invited to reappear among men, for the world, says Rizzi, has again become worthy of such a man's presence. Leaving Dante to Jesuits, and Beatrice to priests, it has made Aretino its favorite model, and has, consequently, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... and by dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard, M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M. Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and unlike Aristotle crouching ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... lines Field managed to throw all the exulting fanaticism of the hopeless bibliomaniac without suppressing one jot of the chuckle of the profane scoffer. And then the gas and candles were relit and the punch and sandwiches and apple pie and cheese were served, and with song and story we passed such a night as sinners mark with red letters for saints to envy. If the reader should ever ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... deep thought and great practical wisdom," says Sedgwick,[2] "one whose piety and benevolence have for many years been shining before the world, and of whose sincerity no scoffer (of whatever school) will dare to start a doubt, recorded his opinion in the great assembly of the men of science who during the past year were gathered from every corner of the Empire within the walls of this University, 'that Christianity ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... very priest, begging for a further supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace. Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters" had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with him. My own custom—we are all of us doctors of a sort in this country—is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... presently found himself accepting without demur the old gentleman's unspoken but sufficiently indicated opinion. His father was in everlasting torment—having been not only unbaptised, but godless and a scoffer. With a quickening sense of the majesty of that Spirit infinitely good, a new apprehension of His plan's symmetry, he read the words meant to explain, to comfort him, silently indicated one day ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... this you add what Solomon says of Scoffers, that they are an abomination to mankind, let him that thinks fit scoff on, and be a Scoffer still; but I account them enemies to me and all that love Virtue ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... production of lights, and the rarer, but for evidential purposes even more valuable, manifestations of spirit photography. The fact that the photograph does not correspond in many cases with any which existed in life, must surely silence the scoffer, though there is a class of bigoted sceptic who would still be sneering if an Archangel alighted in Trafalgar Square. Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton, of Crewe, have brought this phase of mediumship to great perfection, though others ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from his hand, the carriage went on for a short distance. With folded arms, he gazed for some time upon the great city. When he had fixed his piercing look on this modern Babylon, which equally engages the contemplation of the religious enthusiast, the materialist, and the scoffer,—"Great city," murmured he, inclining his head, and joining his hands as if in prayer, "less than six months have elapsed since first I entered thy gates. I believe that the Spirit of God led my steps to thee and that he also enables me to quit thee in triumph; the secret cause ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... may be supposed to guide our decision. 'Imagine the Tale of a Tub to be read by Bishop Butler and by Voltaire, who called Swift a Rabelais perfectionne. Can anyone doubt that the believer would be scandalized, and the scoffer find himself in a thoroughly congenial element? Would not any believer shrink from the use of such weapons, even though ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Keith went on. "And a typical Hebrew—a scoffer. Have you noticed what a disruptive and irreverential brood they are? They move up and down society like some provocative fluid, insensible to our ideals; they take a diabolical pleasure in shattering our old-established conceptions of right and wrong. I confess I like them for that; they need ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Charles Dickens was an "Unbeliever," or a "Unitarian," or an "Episcopalian," or whether "he ever went to church in his life," or "used improper language," or "drank enough to hurt him." He was human, very human, but he was no scoffer or doubter. His religion was of the heart, and his faith beyond questioning. He taught the world, said Dean Stanley over his new-made grave in Westminster Abbey, great lessons of "the eternal value of generosity, of purity, of kindness, and of unselfishness," and by ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
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