"Cant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told by laymen that it ought to be,—a literature of the elementary school with the cant and the platitudes and the goody-goodyism left out, and in their place something of the virility, of the serious study, of the manful effort to solve difficult problems, of the real and vital achievements that ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... week was a tight fit; but that was not my trouble. Reduce your denominator—you know the quotation. I found it no philosophical cant, but a practical solution of life. My food cost me on the average a shilling a day. If more of us limited our commissariat bill to the same figure, there would be less dyspepsia abroad. Generally I cooked my own meals in my own frying-pan; but occasionally ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... speaking, always instructing, always illuminating the heart that is attentive to Him.' Jonathan Edwards called the poor parish minister of Ettrick 'a truly great divine.' But Law goes on to say, 'A great divine is but a cant expression unless it signifies a man greatly advanced in the divine life. A great divine is one whose own experience and example are a demonstration of the reality of all the graces and virtues of the gospel. No ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... would have answered it. Take a specimen of other answers. If anybody were so far left to himself as to go with this question to some of our modern wise men and teachers, they would say, 'Saved? My good fellow, there is nothing to be saved from. Get rid of delusions, and clear your mind of cant and superstition.' Or they would say, 'Saved? Well, if you have gone wrong, do the best you can in the time to come.' Or if you went to some of our friends they would say, 'Come and be baptized, and receive the grace of regeneration in holy baptism; and then come to the sacraments, and be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... a few words must be said as to the vocabulary of sharpers, pickpockets, thieves, and murderers, known as Argot, or thieves' cant, which has of late been introduced into literature with so much success that more than one word of that strange lingo is familiar on the rosy lips of ladies, has been heard in gilded boudoirs, and become the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... for the spoliation of landlords upon the Bible and upon the ideal of a "Divine brotherhood," forgetting that the Bible contains a commandment "Thou shalt not steal," as well as many warnings against lying, deceit, cant, and covetousness. One of the champion Bible-Socialists, for instance, writes: "If all men are brothers, as Christ undoubtedly taught, then the land, the source of wealth, the means by which men can earn their livelihood, should not be the ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... further notice. Criticism disdains to chase a schoolboy to his common-places. To the third it may likewise be objected that it is drawn from mythology, though such as may be more easily assimilated to real life. Idalia's "velvet green" has something of cant. An epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature. Gray is too fond of words arbitrarily compounded. "Many-twinkling" was formerly censured as not analogical; we may say "many-spotted," but scarcely "many-spotting." This ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... herself, she could interpret much that she saw in this new world. Cant phrases, bits of studio lore, artists' patter, their ways of looking at things, their manners of expression, their mannerisms, their little vanities, their ideas, ideals, aspirations, were fast becoming familiar to her. Also she was beginning to notice and secretly to reflect on their generic ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... as it may, so far as humanity is concerned, this hypersensitive effeminacy has but a noxious influence; and all the more for the twofold reason that it is sometimes sincere, though more often mere cant and hypocrisy. At the best, it is a perversion of the truth; for emotion combined with ignorance, as it is in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, is a serious obstacle in the path ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... not for Euphemia I do not think I should wash at all. There is a vast amount of humbug about washing. Vulgar people not only profess a passion for the practice, but a physical horror of being unwashed. It is a sort of cant. I can understand a sponge bath being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second and third. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and nothing to show at the end of it all! Then there is shaving. I have to get shaved because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... an absorbing sensation to her, but the stark glibness of tongue which stood her in good stead before the classes of the Institute failed her in his presence—the presence of real knowledge. She wished to praise, but to praise discriminatingly, with the cant of aesthetic appreciation, so that he should believe that she knew. As for the church itself, she was interested in it; it was fine, of course, but that was a secondary consideration compared with her emotions. His predilection ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... for comic effect. He carried me to London in a hired chaise; we rose from our seat, and put our heads out of the windows, while the postboy removed something under us. He supposed himself in the pillory, and addressed the populace against the government with all the cant of No. 45 and Co. He once told me a little anecdote of the original Parson Adams, whom he knew. "Oh, Sir!" said he to Barnard, almost in a whisper, and with a look of horror, "would you believe it, Sir, he was wicked from a boy;" then going up close to him, "You will be shocked—you will ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... reckonings are not to be a yoke on the neck of one who earnestly seeks to spouse a fitting mate, though late in life. But, what are fifty years? They mark the prime of a healthy man's existence. He has by that time seen the world, can decide, and settle, and is virtually more eligible—to use the cant phrase of gossips—than a young man, even for a young girl. And may not some fair and fresh reward be justly claimed as the crown of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... institutions as the far-famed of Thebes, the Sacred Band annihilated at Chaeroneia, he was compelled to a reticence which permitted him to touch only the surface of the subject. This was inevitable under the present rule of Cant[FN359] in a book intended for the public: but the same does not apply to my version of The Nights, and now I proceed to discuss the matter serieusement, honnetement, historiquement; to show it in decent nudity not in suggestive fig-leaf ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... pray take notice, since I know that it would blister The thin skin of a democrat, I drop the title "Mr.," You have talked a lot of bunkum, all mixed up with most terrific cant. But you truly said that "persons are so very insignificant;" And the author of a speech I read, part scum and partly dreggy, Is perhaps the least significant—that windbag named CARNEGIE. But your kindness most appals me, Sir; how really, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... porte-cochere in the upper town, the first ever built there: "By that door luxury has invaded Geneva." Calvin gave birth, by the sternness of his doctrines and his executions, to that form of hypocritical sentiment called "cant."[*] According to those who practice it, good morals consist in renouncing the arts and the charms of life, in eating richly but without luxury, in silently amassing money without enjoying it otherwise than as Calvin enjoyed power—by thought. Calvin imposed on all the citizens of his adopted ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... is coming it too strong; now I think I do understand you. But, Hiram, drop all that sort of thing. If you want to join Chellis's church, join it; but talk your cant ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... felicity of speech, he addressed two years ago to the Indian Civil Service:—"We have a clouded moment before us now. We shall get through it—but only with self-command and without any quackery or cant, whether it be the quackery of blind violence disguised as love of order, or the cant of unsound and misapplied sentiment, divorced from knowledge and untouched by ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... old sundowners come, And cunningly ask if the master's at home, 'Be off,' she replies, 'with your blarney and cant, Or I'll call my son ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... needed a friend or a meal. And I speak in the same spirit when I add that to build a cathedral, and to spend our tears and pity upon a Saviour who was crucified nearly two thousand years ago, while women and men and little children are being crucified in our midst, without pity and without help, is cant, and sentimentality, and ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... years was Spencer Perceval, an able young barrister, who entered Parliament in 1796 as member for Northampton, and showed considerable skill in finance and debating powers of no mean order. "He spoke (says Sinclair) without the disagreeable cant of the Bar, was never tedious, was peculiarly distinct in matters of business, and explained his financial measures with clearness and ability. His style was singularly acute, bold, sarcastic, and personal." The same authority avers that Pitt, on being asked—"If we lose ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... rose high and clear above the tumult; it was the voice of a Moses come to lead his people from bondage. And that people were quick to appreciate the importance of the presence of a great leader. The convention cast aside all conservatism and cant; it produced a platform that offered to mankind the direct and constitutional means for the restoration of general prosperity and the re-establishment of the principles ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... a far distance and are afraid of guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They are al-ways sick. They are always funy and making fun of boy's hands and they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things. They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them. I dont beleave they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh ant the moon lovely. Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they al-ways now ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... will about the cant of freedom that is becoming so common among us, and from which we were once so free; say what you will, Ro, of the inconsistency of those who raise the cry of 'feudality,' and 'aristocracy,' and 'nobility,' at the very moment ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... what you are, sir," pursued the Squire. "You're a Benthamite. I disown you. Your mother would have died for shame; there was no modern cant about your mother; she thought—she said to me, sir—I'm glad she's in her grave, Dick Naseby. Misinformed! Misinformed, sir? Have you no loyalty, no spring, no natural affections? Are you clockwork, hey? Away! This is no place for you. Away!" (Waving his hands in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I cant begin to tell jest where we went or what we see, enough 'tennyrate I felt to last me through life, but time hurried on jest as usual and brought the last days of ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... Mr Durfy; "going with you, is he? to learn how to cant and sing psalms! Not if I know it—or if he does, you and he and your brother and your ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... cant, and cheat . . . For as those fowls that live in water Are never wet, he did but smatter; Whate'er he labour'd to appear, His understanding still was clear. A paltry wretch he had, half starved, That him in place ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... from the pen of one who, (as we have lately seen,) no sooner descends to particulars than he makes himself ridiculous by betraying his own excessive ignorance.... "The letter for the spirit," also! which is one of the 'cant' expressions of Mr. Jowett and his accomplices in 'free handling,'—based evidently on a misconception of the meaning of 2 Cor. iii. 6. The contrast recurs at pp. 36, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... broke forth: 'Pollexfen, I know you well. I will set a mark on you. You are the patron of the faction. This is an old rogue, a schismatical knave, a hypocritical villain. He hates the Liturgy. He would have nothing but longwinded cant without book;' and then his lordship turned up his eyes, clasped his hands, and began to sing through his nose in imitation of what he supposed to be Baxter's style of praying, 'Lord, we are thy people, thy peculiar people, thy dear ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... Jeremiah reproaches them when he says, "Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal My words everyone from his neighbour." The older prophets used to begin their utterances with the phrase, "the burden of the Lord;" and Jeremiah complains that this had become an odious cant term in the mouths of his contemporaries; and in the same way Zechariah complains that in his day the great word "comfort," which from the lips of Isaiah had descended like dew from heaven on the parched hearts of the people of God, had become a dry and hackneyed phrase in the mouths of false ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... speaking seriously now. Muller felt that this was none of the whining cant people in authority among the Boers find it desirable to adopt. It was what he thought, and it chilled Muller in spite of his pretended scepticism, as the sincere belief of an intellectual man, however opposite to our own, is apt to chill us into doubt of ourselves ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... sermons on the life and character of Garfield. Our Unitarian, Mr. Mann, made his special point on the fact that all the people of every sect had united in endorsement of Garfield's religion, which was most emphatically one of life and action, natural, without cant or observance of the outward rites and ceremonies. There is no report of even a minister's being asked to pray with him. When the bells told of the people's day of special prayer for his life, he exclaimed, "God bless the people," but covered his face, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... cant that would represent the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for mankind, and then most useful when absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregiescity of Corregio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caraccis, or the grand contour of Angelo." "Grant me patience, just heaven! Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting! I would go fifty miles on foot, for I have not a horse worth riding on, to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... raiverence," replied the singer, "but ef I hadn't a knowed it was old man Newcome as took Serlizer away, I'd be cant-hooked and pike-poled ef I wouldn't ha' sung jest them words, that's ef I had a paiun in my chaist and wanted to lay down." When they reached the third lake, through a channel similar to the last, the Captain said sternly: "I'm ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... to unload the heavier stuff, so they could cant the boat and spill the bilge water out of her. The tarpaulin was thrown over some willow bushes for a shelter, and under this they piled their grub boxes and dunnage rolls. The beds were all in watertight canvas bags, ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... sure what the words mean. There is no use talking about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for working ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... confesses an indebtedness to him—which he found it beyond his power to express: "It was he," he writes to Emerson, "that first proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it done): 'behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be Man.'" "He was," says he, "king of himself and his world;... his faculties and feelings were not fettered or prostrated under the iron sway of Passion, but led and guided in kindly union under the mild sway ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... my lad," said Wriggs. "Speak the truth whatever yer does. She's got a cant to port since we ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... women. Her mind was admirably balanced by her home affections, which remained unsullied and unshaken to the end of her days. She had, in common with her three brothers and her charming sister, the advantage of a wise and loving mother—a woman pious without cant, and worldly-wise without being worldly. Mrs. Porter was born at Durham, and when very young bestowed her hand and heart on Major Porter. An old friend of the family assures us that two or three of their children were born in Ireland, and that certainly Jane was amongst the number. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... he distributed tracts, and at every stile he crossed he would leave one having such an exhortation as "Take heed that thou stumbleth not." Yet all this was done in an honest, and, as I believe, a secretly humorous spirit of a serious nature, for Gordon was as opposed to cant and idle protestations as any man. There is a strikingly characteristic story preserved somewhere of what he did when a hypocritical, canting humbug of a local religious secretary of some Society Fund or other paid a visit to a house while he was present. Gordon remained ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... spar-deck bulwarks wrenched off. It seemed as if the whole stern of the ship was about to be carried away. Her larboard quarter next came in contact with the ice, but the severity of the shock saved her; for after the damage which has been described was received, she again bounded off with a cant to starboard. The jib was instantly run up, and it and the other headsails catching the wind, away she glided from the berg. Those who had their eyes turned aft, however, could not refrain from uttering a cry of horror, for at that instant the berg, shaken by the concussion, threatened ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... four plays of Shakspeare's were performed by a principal company in London. "Such was the lamentable taste of those times, that the plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley, were much oftener exhibited than those of our author." What cant is this! If that taste were "lamentable," what are we to think of our own times, when plays a thousand times below those of Fletcher, or even of Shirley, continually displace Shakspeare? Shakspeare would himself have exulted ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way, they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in this respect is in its annihilating a prejudice by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... rule it will be found that, while most of our counties have given family names, sometimes corrupted, e.g. Lankshear, Willsher, Cant, Chant, for Kent, with which we may compare Anguish for Angus, the larger towns are rather poorly represented, the movement having always been from country to town, and the smaller spot serving for more exact description. An exception is Bristow (Bristol), Mid. Eng. brig-stow, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... it to your konshens, Are is the same to us as milk to babies, Or water is to fish, or pendlums to clox, Or roots and airbs unto an Injun doctor, Or little pills unto an omepath, Or Boze to girls. Are is for us to brethe. What signifize who preaches ef I cant brethe? What's Pol? What's Pollus to sinners who are ded? Ded for want of breth! Why Sextant when we dye Its only coz we cant brethe no more—that's all. And now O Sextant? let me beg of you To let a ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... religion because they fear it, and ridicule Christianity from sheer, shallow ignorance. Our own country at present abounds in 'Bletsons,' in conceited, ignorant 'infidel' scribblers of many descriptions, in of all whom we can still trace the cant and drawl of the old-fashioned fanaticism to which they are in reality nearly allied, while they appear to oppose it. For the truth is, that popular infidelity—to borrow Mr. Caudle's simile of tyrants—is only Puritanism turned inside out. We see this, even when ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... converting its ennobling scenery into the images of lofty thoughts; which shall give visible form and life to the abstract ideas of our written constitutions; which shall confer upon virtue all the strength of principle and all the energy of passion; which shall disentangle freedom from cant and senseless hyperbole, and render it a thing of such loveliness and grandeur as to justify all self-sacrifice; which shall make us love man by the new consecrations it sheds on his life and destiny; which shall force through the thin partitions of conventialism and expediency; vindicate ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Jerusalem. Passing Sinjil, Lubban, and Sawiyeh, we rested just beyond Sawiyeh under the great oak, at the divergence of the valley of Laithma. Beneath its wide-spreading branches a flock of sheep was resting at noon (Cant. i. 7.) From these we got ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... said, "as if I was cheering at a boat-race, or wrangling over a betting-book—eh? Ah, we were so easily heated when I was a young man! Let's change the subject. I know nothing to the prejudice of your friend, Mr. Delamayn. It's the cant of the day," cried Sir Patrick, relapsing again, "to take these physically-wholesome men for granted as being morally-wholesome men into the bargain. Time will show whether the cant of the day is right.—So you are actually coming back to Lady Lundie's after a mere flying visit to your own property? ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... "in it" for whoever appeared to be essaying a benevolent enterprise. Respectable, liberal-handed, habitually amused, slightly caustic, he looked out for the good of himself and those related to him and considered that he was justified in closing his corporate regards at that point. He had no cant and no hypocrisy, no pose and no fads. A sane, aggressive, self-centered, rational materialist of the American brand, it was not only his friends who thought him a fine fellow. He himself would have admitted so much and have been ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking—an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer—tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... all cant, but am satisfied that the chief reason why France does not succeed better in her revolutions is, because she lacks the steadiness which a sincere devotion to religion gives to a nation. The country needs less man-worship and more God-worship. It needs less adulation ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... lip, In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky; In brief it is an aspect deleterious, A face decidedly not serious, A face profane, that would not do at all To make a face at Exeter Hall,— That Hall where bigots rant, and cant, and pray, And laud each other face to face, Till ev'ry farthing-candle ray Conceives itself a great ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... any of your hypocritical cant, Cunnil McLane! What have you been teachin' that child to read an' write fur—out of your Bible, too? What do you bring her presents fur, and hang around us when we know you despise us all, except fur the black folks we can sell you cheap? ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... justify it on this particular voyage. Down, down, down the great hull would slide till Katy would hold her breath with fear lest it might never right itself again; then slowly, slowly the turn would be made, and up, up, up it would go, till the cant on the other side was equally alarming. On the whole, Katy preferred to have her own side of the ship, the downward one; for it was less difficult to keep herself in the berth, from which she was in continual danger of being thrown. ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... wont to pride himself upon being a man of business, and he averred, in contradiction to what he called the cant of sonneteers, that there was no necessary connection between genius and an aversion or contempt for the common duties of life. On the contrary, he was of opinion that to spend some fair portion of every day in any matter-of-fact occupation was ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... In the printed version of this text, all apostrophes for contractions such as "can't", "wouldn't" and "he'd" were omitted, to read as "cant", "wouldnt", and "hed". This etext edition ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... embellishment, through my favourite channels of diurnal communication—and so, sir, you have my history. Sneer. Most obligingly communicative indeed! and your confession, if published, might certainly serve the cause of true charity, by rescuing the most useful channels of appeal to benevolence from the cant of imposition. But, surely, Mr. Puff, there is no great mystery in your present profession? Puff. Mystery, sir! I will take upon me to say the matter was never scientifically treated nor reduced to rule before. Sneer. Reduced ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... an individual, can covertly stab the peace of another while saying, "Art thou in health, my brother?" and even the peace of civilization can be betrayed by a Judas-kiss. Professions of peace belong to the cant of diplomacy and have always characterized the most ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... raised more objections to his character, than all the enemies to that excellent man. Sir John had a root of bitterness that "put rancours in the vessel of his peace." Fielding, he says, was the inventor of a cant phrase, "Goodness of heart, which means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog." He should have known, that kind affections are the essence of virtue: they are the will of God implanted in our nature, to aid and strengthen moral obligation; they ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... The Voice!" he whispered. "Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill! You lie!" he cried in a sudden outburst of terrible fierceness. "He was not a fool. He loved men more than the mockery and cant of courts. He loved—he trusted me—and I betrayed him. Who knew when he fled wildly away from the pomp and inequalities he hated? I! Who watched for his secret letters? I! Who came to America when his letter of homesick pleading came? I! I! I! Who killed him when conscience and duty would ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... "Cant and hypocrisy is a fashion of theirs, if you like," she interrupted. "You are not going the right way about it if you wish me to pay any attention to ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... a true lover of nature, without pretense or cant of any kind. She has an eye for flowers,—indeed her little garden is the delight of the neighborhood,—and she finds harebells on Thanksgiving Day and ferns in midwinter. She knows the minerals in the stone-walls, and likes to trace the course of old glaciers across the farms beyond ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... standard he had been trained in at home. If Paul and Esther had done nothing else for their children they had certainly done this; they had implanted in their minds a deep and strong feeling that one of the things to be most desired in life is honesty; clean, frank, wholesome honesty, free from cant and hypocrisy and double dealing. And Walter knew in his heart that what he was going to do was not honest to Bauer, even after he had juggled with his conscience and proved to himself that Bauer had no real rights in the matter. He knew perfectly well that the German student did have ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the air in Battery Park, where the one would invoke the Statue of Liberty for a thought, or the gilded domes of Broadway for a metaphor, while the other would be scouring the horizon for the Nothingness, which is called, in the recondite cant of the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... talk, but the moralist, who looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart and knows many hours of melancholy and hypochondria. He preaches the morality of his time—the morality of Richardson and Young—only tempered by a hearty contempt for cant, sentimentalism, and all unreality, and expressing his deeper and stronger nature. The style, however acquired, has the idiosyncrasy of the man himself; but I shall have to speak of the Johnsonian view in the next period, when ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... likewise to be observed, that this society has a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... compose one verb phrase: as in the sentences, (a) "They knew well that this woman ruled over thirty millions of subjects;" (b) "If all the flummery and extravagance of an army were done away with, the money could be made to go much further;" (c) "It is idle cant to pretend anxiety for the better distribution of wealth until we can devise means by which this preying upon people of small incomes can ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... Cold as time. Went to a sosiable tonite at the Unitarial vestry. cant go again because Keene told mother i was impident to the people. i want impident. you see they was making poetry and all sitting around the vestry. they wanted to play copenhagin and post office and ...
— The Real Diary of a Real Boy • Henry A. Shute
... form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical jokes,—a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as "English cant." ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Judge of the Illinois Circuit Court: "I have seen much in Liberty that I agreed with, and much that I disagreed with, but I never saw any cant, hypocrisy, or insincerity in it, which makes it an almost ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... puczical, a cant phrase probably borrowed from the missionaries"the fear of my heart,"—in my humbleness. Puczikal appears to be a root-word, though of three syllables. It means the heart of men and animals, also the mind or soul, the desires, and the interior of certain growths, as the pith of maize, ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... cant phrase, from what rise I know not, but it is made use of when one thinks it is not worth while to give a distinct answer, or think themselves ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. A foreign critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that England was then pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her native energy was diverted to oppression, in morals and religion it took the form of hypocrisy and persecution. Abroad she was supporting the Holy Alliance, throwing her weight into the scale against all movements for freedom. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... story. It happened in Markdale to an uncle of my mothers. He wanted to marry Miss Jemima Parr. Felicity says Jemima is not a romantic name for a heroin of a story but I cant help it in this case because it is a true story and her name realy was Jemima. My mothers uncle was named Thomas Taylor. He was poor at that time and so the father of Miss Jemima Parr did not want him for a ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Constitution," desiring only to live and die as free citizens under the protecting wing of the mother country. Recalling all this sickening sentimentalism, Mr. Paine uttered a loud and ringing BOSH! Let us clear our minds of cant, he said in effect, and ask ourselves what is the nature of government in general and of the famous British Constitution in particular. Like the Abbe Sieyes, Mr. Paine had completely mastered the science of government, which was in fact extremely simple. ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... "ennobles," and that when they say ennobles they mean that it is destructive to the ten thousand things in life that they do not enjoy or understand or tolerate, things that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... would one babble promiscuously on such awful themes; and to have the soul's sublime and eternal emotions, its sacred and unspoken communings, lugged out into farcical prominence by such conversational cant as that, is to dry up the very fountain of true religion, and put a premium on the successful ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... usefulness; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one time infinite wrangling, as to what both the meaning and the expression should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths and cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning than we do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be reproduced through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out of any familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... American Unitarian divine, "partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliquity, spiritual ignorance,—in short, of puerility and superstition involved in a large part of the appeals, the preaching, the cant terms, the popular dogmas, the current conversation of Christendom,—are discouraging evidences how backward is the religious thought of our day, as compared with its general thought; how little harmony there is between our ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... heart pants for the honour of a Bachelor of (p. 150) Arts degree must wait patiently till near four years have revolved.... He is obliged during this period, once to oppose and once to respond.... This opposing and responding is termed, in the cant of the place, doing generals. Two boys or men, as they call themselves, agree to do generals together. The first step in this mighty work is to procure arguments. These are always handed down, from generation to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist of foolish syllogisms on foolish ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... was a man of decided genius, and an ardent lover of nature. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He was sincerity itself, and no cant or affectation is to be found in his writings. He was religious in his own way; incapable of any profanation, by act or thought, although his original living and thinking detached him from the social religious forms. He thought that without religion no great deed had ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Kep in bounds it don't do no great 'arm. Poor old BUGGINS, he flushes and coughs; Gets hangry, he do, at my talk. I sez, keep on your hair, my good bloke, Hindignation ain't good for your chest; cut this Sosherlist cant, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... old celestial cant, Confess'd his flame, and swore by Styx, Whate'er she would desire, to grant— But wise Ardelia knew ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... of its decline, as they see it, is a perfectly natural one—due to the fact that it has long since out-lived its usefulness, and in the present stage of civilization, people are much better off without it. They want Sunday to be, not a holy day, but a holiday, unhampered by Blue Laws or religious cant of ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... regard all these as masters. Their word was to be my law. My situation was a most trying one. At times I needed a dozen pair of hands. I was called a dozen ways in the space of a single minute. Three or four voices would strike my ear at the same moment. It was—"Fred., come help me to cant this timber here."—"Fred., come carry this timber yonder."—"Fred., bring that roller here."—"Fred., go get a fresh can of water."—"Fred., come help saw off the end of this timber."—"Fred., go quick, and get the crowbar."—"Fred., ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contemptible as the pseudoscientific cant which is talked ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... attack on cant. It was a story written by Dickens to protest against all he hated in the nature of oppression. Dickens hated the vulgar cant that only helps to bring self-advertisement: the ethic that the poor must listen ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than this, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... gladly believe that such a friendship, begun at the altar when he is being consecrated to a Christian life, may go with him and be a help to the dear little man. In our belligerent independence and our freedom from creeds and cant we have thrown away too much, and can afford to reassert our belief in and respect for ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... shoes, a pink muslin dress, an apple-green stuff sash, and black silk gloves, with yellow roses in her hair. Wherefore I fled from Miss McKenna and sought my friend Private Mulvaney, who was at the cant—refreshment-table. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... with anguish at the mere hint of oppression. No cheek is so easily bedewed by the unnecessary tear as the cheek of the ruffian—and those who compose the "editorials" for Mr Hearst's papers have cynically realised this truth. They rant and they cant and they argue, as though nothing but noble thoughts were permitted to lodge within the poor brains of their readers. Their favourite gospel is the gospel of Socialism. They tell the workers that the world is their inalienable inheritance, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... slang are often confused in the popular mind, yet they are not synonymous, though very closely allied, and proceeding from a common Gypsy origin. Cant is the language of a certain class—the peculiar phraseology or dialect of a certain craft, trade or profession, and is not readily understood save by the initiated of such craft, trade or profession. It may be correct, according to the ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Jarvis, I shall go distracted. This morning he began to speak to me about my soul—the brave boy that he used to be, talking of my soul to ME! Listen to what I tell you and be reasonable. I know perfectly well, and so do you, that before he took up with this sickening cant he was in love with you and you were in love with him. I saw it all and said nothing. I understand there's no more flirting now. Ah, well, his blood is red yet; I've not forgotten what five-and-twenty is, and he'll come if you whistle. You can't marry him, of course, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... friend,' pursued the Alderman, 'there's a great deal of nonsense talked about Want—"hard up," you know; that's the phrase, isn't it? ha! ha! ha!—and I intend to Put it Down. There's a certain amount of cant in vogue about Starvation, and I mean to Put it Down. That's all! Lord bless you,' said the Alderman, turning to his friends again, 'you may Put Down anything among this sort of people, if you only know the way ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... character of new associates whom it may please to take up—so it may be that the well-educated man, confident of his impeccability and altogether off his guard, more readily absorbs into his daily speech cant phrases and even solecisms than the half-educated who is ever watchful lest he slip. The American has a way of writing, figuratively, with a dictionary at his elbow and a grammar within reach. There are few educated Englishmen who do not consider their own authority—the ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Cant for religion, sounding words for truth, Fraud leads to fortune, gelt for guilt atones, No care for hoary age or tender youth, For widows' tears or helpless ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... God defer to hear their prayers that hath not wickedly departed from him?—A. He loves to hear their voice, to try their faith, to see their importunity, and to observe how they can wrestle with him for a blessing (Cant 2:14; Matt 15:22-28; Luke ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his point of view, Bulstrode was ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... other. In fact, we ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the Cant of flattering Friend Admire my Forehead's Apollonic Bend, Then to the Glass I've wreathed my sad Regard - The Looking-Glass is candid to ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... "Enough of that cant!" interrupted the duke impatiently. "Didn't I charge you to have that cursed de Sigognac, otherwise Captain Fracasse, cleared out of my way? You have not done it—my orders have not been obeyed. It is worth while, upon my word, to keep confounded hired rascals to do such work for me, at ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... back in pagan night, And take my chance with Socrates for bliss, Than be the Christian of a faith like this, Which builds on heavenly cant its earthly sway, And in a convert mourns to lose a ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... this company thirty-two years. I have fought the men four times. I have never been defeated. It has been said that times have changed. If they have, I have not changed with them. It has been said that masters and men are equal. Cant. There can be only one master in a house. It has been said that Capital and Labor have the same interests. Cant. Their interests are as wide asunder as the poles. There is only one way of treating men—with the iron rod. Masters are ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... jar, whatever the size. Boil until tender enough to pierce with a wisp. Take the fruit out carefully with a spoon and place in the jar. Fill the jar with the boiling syrup, being careful always to cant the jar as you pour it in. If you do this, the jar will never crack, as it is likely to do if held perfectly straight or upright. Always run around the inside of the jar with a silver knife, and you will have no ...
— Things Mother Used To Make • Lydia Maria Gurney
... to-night for saying it, my heart sat somewhat nearer to those old people who were perhaps a little too dumpish in their repentance and their faith and their hope that morning, than it did to those who took to the table with a light heart. I know all your flippant cant about gospel liberty and against Highland introspection, as you call it—as well as all your habitual neglect of a close and deep self-examination, as Paul called it; but I tell you all to-night that it would be the salvation of your soul if you too worked your way up to every returning Lord's table ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... of breach of promise were assessed in advance and without respect of sex. Whichever side repented of the bargain undertook to pay ten pounds by way of compensation for the broken pledge. As a nation, Israel is practical and free from cant. Romance and moonshine are beautiful things, but behind the glittering veil are always the stern realities of things and the weaknesses of human nature. The high contracting parties were signing the document as Becky returned. The bridegroom, who halted a little on one leg, was ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... many of them are examples of elaborate criticism, in the most masterly style. In his review of the 'Memoirs of the Court of Augustus,' he has the resolution to think and speak from his own mind, regardless of the cant transmitted from age to age, in praise of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the highest respect by the medical profession because physicians generally felt, in the words of Dr. Ransohoff, that "his life had a spiritual significance; there was no cant, only humility." Sometimes he walked to the operating room beside a fearful patient, and one man later said, "Something came through him to me. The fear was gone." He often went with parishioners to a doctor's office, and sent hundreds of others giving them an infinite amount of time ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... are fatigued and disgusted with this cant:—"The Carnatic is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous as ever." They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe that by sowing of dragons' teeth, men may come up ready grown and ready armed. They who will give themselves the trouble of considering ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Fig. 8. A heavy pair of tongs, like ice-tongs, is attached to one end, and the log is snaked out by horses to the skidway. If the log is very heavy, one end is put on a dray. By one way or another the log is dragged out and across the two parallel skids, on which it is rolled by cant-hooks to the end of skids toward the road way. If other logs already occupy the skids, each new log as it arrives is piled on the first tier. As the pile grows higher, each log is "decked," that is, rolled up parallel poles laid slanting up the face of the pile, by means of a chain passed ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... nonsense! The whole thing is a horrible confusion of ideas—half remorse and half cant—the one so mixed up with the other in your mind that you cannot disentangle them. But, believe me, others feel very sure that sacred things and—and what I won't call bluntly by its name, go very ill together! So don't waste those airs on me; ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... politics and such things in the abstract—always in the abstract—calmly in the abstract. He was an old-fashioned Conservative of the Sir Leicester Deadlock style. When he was moved by an extra shower of aggressive democratic cant—which was seldom—he defended Capital, but only as if it needed no defence, and as if its opponents were merely thoughtless, ignorant children whom he condescended to set right because of their inexperience and ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... calamity, since it has come, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit of the future society of mankind. It must be made to serve a purpose in helping to liberate the world from sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... man as Geoffrey Owen must have wanted heart and fire. I watched him first to see if he could ride; he rode well. When he came he could not fence; in six months he was a good hand with the foils; physical fatigue seemed as unknown to him as mental inertia. There was no strain and no cant about him; he smoked hard, drank well after exertion, with pleasure always. He delighted to talk to my mother, chaffing her Styrian ideas with a graceful deference that made her smile. Victoria adored him openly, and Krak did not understand why he was not odious. Thus he conquered the Court, and ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... and praised by Charles II, and his court, and the one that best represents the spirit of the victorious party, is the satirical poem of Hudibras by Samuel Butler. The object of the work is to satirize the cant and excesses of Puritanism, just as the Don Quixote of Cervantes burlesques the extravagances ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... were heard, and if we had been, it would have made no difference, for before anything could be done the ship was among the breakers, and a second later she struck, not very hard, but just sufficiently so to cant us broadside-on. Then she struck again, and hung until a tremendous sea broke aboard, sweeping her decks and doubtless washing all hands on deck overboard—at all events that sea took me and swept me helplessly over the bows, as also Van Ryn ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... Ah, Liberty! Fallen in your supreme defence! Gone is the friend that in a phrase The "Common Sense" of things could settle, That with a stroke could slay a craze, And folly lash with flail of nettle. Who now will thunder in the Times Against the Socialistic Rad's tone? Who'll flout the cant and check the crimes ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... lad "Betty"—was not the affection they lavished upon him that which manhood ever owes to the weak and helpless. Search London over and you will not find elemental goodness in a shape more worthy than it was to be found in the caves—nor can we forego a moment's reflection upon the cant which ever preaches the vice of the poor and so rarely stops to preach ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it nicely with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my benefit. And, on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The casual ward. It's a cant word, you know." ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... there was yet time—resign his fortune, and accept Sophie and a clear conscience, poverty and a country parish. But persons who have wealth absolutely in their power, to take or to leave, sec clearly how much poetical extravagance, hypocrisy, and cant exist in the arguments of those who advocate the beauties and advantages of being poor. Deliberately and voluntarily to forego the opportunities, the influence, the ease, the refinement, which money alone can command—let not the sacrifice be underrated! Few, perhaps, have had the choice fairly ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... which man would have it. He went into battle with supreme confidence, not, as has been alleged, that the Lord had delivered the enemy into his hands, but that whatever happened would be the best that could happen. And he was as free from cant as from self-deception. It may be said of Jackson, as has been said so eloquently of the men whom, in some respects, he closely resembled, that "his Bible was literally food to his understanding and a guide to his ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... is much given to this silly sort of cant, more gratifying to vulgar prejudice, than becoming a scholar, or a man of science. One knows not how to show its absurdity better than, by merely directing the reader to consider for a moment, the things that are put in contrast or compared ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... in Spiritual Grace. The Gifts of Mammon you should ne'r implore, Nor wish for Gold, unless to give the Poor; It makes your Art contemptible appear, Less follow'd too, and look'd into more near; For if all those that preach up Paradise, Will have their shares of every human Vice, They shall Cant long enough e're I believe, Or pin my ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... and an interest in many sides of life, that are often despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great masters of expression who keep sending their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... others in 1831, 1853, and 1861. It was, however, subjected to some criticism and ridicule, and gave rise to the expression "bowdlerise," always used in an opprobrious sense. On the other hand, Mr. Swinburne has said, "More nauseous and foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of B. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children." B. subsequently essayed a similar ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... C. A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. Used at the present day in the streets of London; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the houses of Parliament; the dens of St. Giles; and the palaces of St. James. Preceded by a history of cant and vulgar language; with glossaries of two secret languages, spoken by the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of wedlock. The virgins wear theirs loose, plaited in small plaits of three, which, being parted in the centre, allows the hair to fall evenly down all round the head like a well-arranged mop. On approaching these fairs, they seductively give their heads a cant backwards, with a half side-jerk, which parts the locks in front, and discloses a pretty little smiling face, with teeth as white as pearls, and lips as red as rubies. Pretty as they are when young, this beauty fades at ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... declared Watson, "and instead of one dead negro there'd be fifty. The white people are claiming now that Campbell didn't stop with robbery and murder. A special edition of the Morning Chronicle, just out, suggests a further purpose, and has all the old shopworn cant about race purity and supremacy and imperative necessity, which always comes to the front whenever it is sought to justify some outrage on the colored folks. The blood of the whites is ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... chief-product was little other than a chief wind-bag, blown large by Popular air; not a man with the heart of a man, but a poor spasmodic incorruptible pedant, with a logic-formula instead of heart; of Jesuit or Methodist-Parson nature; full of sincere-cant, incorruptibility, of virulence, poltroonery; barren as the east-wind! Two such chief-products are too ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... think Westminster Abbey helps me personally to attend to the service. On the contrary, I think it makes me think of the building. I used somehow to imagine that service in the open air was necessarily associated with cant. Now I like it far the best. Not merely because it is more sanitary—till some one learns how to ventilate a building decently—but because it absolutely forces you to feel insignificant, and anxious that the great Creator should condescend to care ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he without a creed? From his verses on the Making of a Poet ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... light as froth, but amusing, retail," as Stopford Brooke remarks, "with liveliness all the gossip of the time"; he is characterised by Carlyle as "one of the clearest-sighted men of his century; a determined despiser and merciless dissector of cant" (1717-1797). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sets foot within the borders of the home State. When other States enact and rigidly enforce some such drastic measure, the West will begin to have some regard for their particular brand of virtue. Until then, the West may be pardoned for believing that cant and hypocrisy often join hands with the lawless element and make a grandstand play for ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... chaplain refuse his ration. And of the salt of the good God's earth are the chaplains. There was Major the Reverend John Pringle, of Yukon fame, whose only son Jack was killed in action after he had walked two hundred miles to enlist. No cant, no smug psalm-singing, mourners'-bench stuff for him. He believed in his Christianity like a man; he was ready to fight for his belief like a man; he cared for us like a father, and stood beside us in the mornings as we drank our stimulant. Again, I repeat if a man is found drunk while on active ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... (whipping) Post was a cant name for a disreputable person, who would be willing to give ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... cant words renders jests imperfectly intelligible. Greek humour was clearer in this respect than that of the present day, especially since our vocabulary has been so much enriched from America. Puns also restrict the pleasantries dependent on them to one country, no great loss perhaps, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... will be too great, for us to drag her from her imagined height into the dust. By force of arms, starvation and the power of lies, they hoped to force us back to unimportance, and now the issue is: Whether the categoric imperative of the East Prussian Kant, or the hypocrisy of British cant, ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... reasoning equally uncharitable and illogical. My son had an undisguised dislike to any ostentatious display of religious sentiment and phraseology, particularly on the part of those who were not teachers by calling. He sometimes suspected more cant than sincerity in the practice, and thought these matters better suited for inward communication between man and his Maker than for public exhibition on common occasions. With my wife's permission I insert the following letter, now for ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Your very words, Scrooge. Decrease the surplus population. (SCROOGE hangs his head in shame.) Man, if man you be in heart, forbear that wicked cant. Will you decide what men shall live, and what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... where you shot at one thing an aimed at another. I hate to butt in Mable but it didnt seem right. I says I seen the Indien girl in the circus shoot the spots out of a card over her shoulder but wouldnt it be more censible to cut out the trick stuff till we was more used to the thing. You cant argue ...
— Dere Mable - Love Letters Of A Rookie • Edward Streeter
... misunderstood him, as it was not his intention nor his desire to fight. Nevertheless, to the astonishment and sorrow of his religious friends, he accepted Mr. Clay's challenge with the utmost possible promptitude, and bore himself throughout the affair like (to use the poor, lying, tory cant of the last generation) "a high-toned Virginia gentleman." Colonel Benton tells us that Mr. Randolph invented an ingenious excuse for the enormous inconsistency of his conduct on this occasion. A duel, he maintained, was private war, and was justifiable on the same ground ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... charity precedes religion; and devotion seems to precede charity; since, in the Scriptures, charity is represented by fire, while devotion is signified by fatness which is the material of fire [*Cant. 8:6; Ps. 52:6]. Therefore devotion is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... he at intervals had beheld it afterwards) was the true presentment of the soul of the woman whose body was his. It was not—as Hilary Vane thought it—a contempt for the practice of thanking one's Maker for daily bread, but a contempt for cant of one who sees the humour in cant. A masculine version of that look Mr. Flint now beheld in the eyes of Austen Vane, and the enraging effect on the president of the United Railroads was much the same as it had been on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the way. Just as we'd settled down to work. What harm are we doing? Well, it is tiresome. Let them finish the job themselves. Oh dear, oh dear! We cant have a minute to ourselves. Shoving ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... thought he lays a stress unusual in modern life. It is the cant of the day, in judging the value of a man, that "it does not matter what he believes but only what he does." That is not true. It matters infinitely what a man believes; for as a man's belief so he is; as a man's thought, so inevitably is his action. There ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant |
