"Cocksure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hammerton, cocksure of his game and pleasantly cheered by the potent draught, thought that he had never interviewed so ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lift up. And when I shall be lift up from the earth, I will draw all things unto myself." For the devil was disappointed of his purpose: for he thought all to be his own; and when he had once brought Christ to the cross, he thought all cocksure. But there lost he all reigning: for Christ said, Omnia traham ad meipsum: "I will draw all things to myself." He meaneth, drawing of man's soul to salvation. And that he said he would do per semetipsum, by his own self; not by any other body's sacrifice. ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... may be so, the stuff is full of squid beaks. But Garboy is too cocksure. Anyway we have the stuff, and stowed safe in the lazaret. Counting what we picked up before, we have 1,500 pounds. A great fortune for the owners, and a fine bonus for us. When I get home, I will buy a farm, and settle ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Ernest Dummkopf. Now we shall know all about it! ALL. Well—what's the news? How is the election going? ERN. Oh, it's a certainty—a practical certainty! Two of the candidates have been arrested for debt, and the third is a baby in arms—so, if you keep your promises, and vote solid, I'm cocksure of election! OLGA. Trust to us. But you remember the conditions? ERN. Yes—all of you shall be provided for, for life. Every man shall be ennobled—every lady shall have unlimited credit at the Court Milliner's, and all salaries shall be paid ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... I want war. I want to go out and help lambaste those infernally cocksure armies of that jelly-and-cream King. We've parleyed long enough. Now we'll fight. Force is the only convincing ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... foreordained. If it was not "the opposition" it was the police. When Mulberry Street took a rest the publisher's "reader" began it, and the proof-reader. This last is an enemy of human kind anyhow. Not only that he makes you say things you never dreamed of, but his being so cocksure that he knows better every time, is a direct challenge to a fight. The "reader" is tarred with the same stick. He is the one who passes on the manuscript, and he has an ingrown hatred of opinion. If a man has that, he ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... said he, 'disappointed me. I hoped to put him in good humour by a treat at the tavern of a brown fricassee of rabbits, which cost ten shillings, with two quarts of wine, besides my conversation. I thought myself cocksure of his horse, which he readily promised me, but said that Mr. Tonson had just such another design of going to Cambridge, expecting there the copy of a new kind of Horace from Dr. ——; and if Mr. Tonson went, he was pre-engaged ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... never can tell," declared Dick Hendricks, who had come up just in time to catch the last remark. "I've got private information from below, and let me warn every fellow not to be cocksure about Paulding. That fellow they've got coaching them is no slouch. He was a college grad. just the same as our Mr. Shays; and they say he coached Princeton for several years, ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... reinoculation has been less and less effective, with the monotonous questioning, ever more sardonic in tone: "How can you be deluded by the official bulletins?" or: "What do you know about war, to make you so cocksure?" ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... was angry she called her father an "old country Jake." Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... especially to lawyers, was principally due, I think, to my friend's habit of viewing occurrences from an unusual standpoint. He did not look at things quite as other men looked at them. He had no prejudices and he knew no conventions. When other men were cocksure, Thorndyke was doubtful. When other men despaired, he entertained hopes; and thus it happened that he would often undertake cases that had been rejected contemptuously by experienced lawyers, and, what is more, would bring them to a ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... galvanized the boy into action. He had met Gilbert Palgrave out hunting. He had seen the impertinent, cocksure way in which he ran his eyes over women. He clutched the handle of the case and said: "That's all right, thanks. Miss Ludlow will write to Mrs. Palgrave." Then he turned and went down the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... his breath. He sounded so cocksure, so all-knowing. He felt like beating himself. His earlier self, who had blithely toured Valier trailing the microphone wires without any real premonition of trouble. It always happens to the other guy—Not this time, ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... side gave me a cocksure smile and the short guy said, "We're about to leave St. Louis on U.S. 40, Cornell. I hope you won't find this journey ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... I didn't foresee the way of it. If ever I felt tempted to believe our engagement was getting to be the real thing, why, I said to myself, 'Wait till she sees March again before you begin to be cocksure, my man.' Well, now you've seen him. And I guess you've seen in the same minute that ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... known were not like this. The men who loved her,—and they had been many,—were impetuous and insistent, demanding much and offering everything,—vain-glorious warriors who counted confidently on easy conquest. She had come in contact with but one class of men: the spoiled, cocksure sons of the rich who love in haste and have it over with while there is yet time to love again. She caught herself guiltily wondering how many men of her acquaintance would have allowed this engaging opportunity to pass without making the most of it! And why should this man be different from ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... harvest of dimes from the whiskey drinking. 'Why, bless ye,' he said to me, 'I should be broke, clean done up, if it warn't fur the drinks; I haint got more'n a bit, or three fips, fur nary a fowl; the fust shot allers brings down the bird; they're all cocksure on the trigger—ary man on 'em kin hit a turkey's eye at a hundred paces.' This was true; and in such schools were trained the unerring marksmen who are now 'bringing down' the bravest youth of our country, like fowls at a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Flemish Dragoons. They were so glad to have Flemings to sabre Paris that the Big Sow came in, and they all spat on the people's cockade, and put on the White Hog colour, and also a black one, and vowed they were cocksure of shutting us up. They brought in the Big Hog from his hunting, and he is in the mess, too. At the end they all followed Madame Veto home, shouting everything to vex us patriots. I am a patriot," he added winking. "It is an outrage on the nation. We must go to Versailles. We must bring ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... there were cheaper places," he chortled, "and the owner gave me the advantage of the broker's commission, too. Come out next spring and see what a bargain I found." In late May there came a wail for help from the cocksure buyer. A few days of unseasonably warm weather and a strong east wind had revealed the reason for the bargain. Back of a wooded area to the rear of his holding, was a combination hog farm and refuse dump. The owner of it got little or no rental from the tenant farmer who carried ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... too deeply buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as legend, myth, and story. In the blood ran all their richness undiluted. Life was simple, full charged with an immense delight. At home little cocksure writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they overstepped the limits of an artificial schedule; but here "everything possible to be believed was still an image of truth," ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... between the heartiness of Sydney Smith and the dainty fastidiousness of Matthew Arnold, and yet imitate neither. They have a quality, indeed, which is entirely their own and is entirely delightful. One of the things which is so charming about them is that they are authoritative without being cocksure. What could be more admirable than the passage which points out that Southey, "who lived almost entirely with domestic women, actually died in the belief that he was a poet"? The pathos of the situation, and the Olympian stroke delivered ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Then, when the cocksure critic in his crudeness Pops you the question while his back he pats, "What have you done?" you'll find at last, thank goodness, One ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... "I've been too cocksure," he muttered presently. "I shouldn't have spent that twelve thousand for rights of way until I had settled the ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... him before he was locked up," Richey explained. "He's clever enough to be worth knowing, and, besides, I'm not so cocksure of his guilt as our friend the Patch on the Seat of Government. No murderer worthy of the name needs six different motives for the same crime, beginning with robbery, and ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... occasion, that everything would be done as quietly and as leniently as possible; and that no edge of the disturbance would in any case be allowed to overflow in the direction of the royal palace. As he listened to the cocksure tone of this new minister, and the almost patronizing air with which he exposed his official fitness for the post so recently conferred on him, the King ceased to ask questions—let the man talk himself out,—and then, when silence ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in it—did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other men would get the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie |
