"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one of the apogees of the town which, in the course of its interminable duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples, that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... of October, with his provincial aide-de-camp, at Fort George. His surviving aide-de-camp, Major Glegg, recollecting the decided aversion of the general to every thing that bore the appearance of ostentatious display, endeavoured to clothe the distressing ceremony with all his "native simplicity." But at the same time there were military honors that could not be avoided, and the following was the order of the mournful procession,[102] "of which," wrote Major Glegg, "I enclose a plan; but no ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... his head and grinned good-naturedly in Andy's direction, and refrained from finishing what he was going to say. "I sure do like them wind-flowers scattered all over the ground," he observed with such deliberate and ostentatious irrelevance that the Happy Family laughed, even to Andy Green, who had at first ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... these days of popular education and facile journalism, to be reminded of the real scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means, by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind in style. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... is somewhat ostentatious, but frank and honest. He is introduced on a stage which is worthy of him—at the house of the rich Callias, in which are congregated the noblest and wisest of the Athenians. He considers openness ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... was, Samantha was banging doors and slatting tin pails about furiously to keep up an ostentatious show of ill humor. She tried her best to grunt with displeasure when Gay, seated in a wash-tub, crowed and beat the water with her dimpled hands, so that it splashed all over the carpet; but all the time there ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from Marlow I regard as one of our greatest successes. It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious. We had insisted at all the shops we had been to that the things should be sent with us then and there. None of your "Yes, sir, I will send them off at once: the boy will be down there before you are, sir!" and then fooling about on the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... his kinsman, Bernabo, jewels and golden coins to a large amount, the whole sum disbursed on this occasion would appear so enormous as to make one doubt whether a petty sovereign could really afford such ostentatious prodigality. But when we consider that the flourishing state of the commerce of Italy attracted thither all the wealth of Europe, we are no longer surprised at an expenditure which, however great, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... on Wednesday with all its pomp," wrote Walpole, who although not present seems to have followed the trial with the keenest interest, "and the doubly-noble prisoner went through her part with universal admiration. Instead of her usual ostentatious folly and clumsy pretensions to cunning, all her conduct was decent, and even seemed natural. Her dress was entirely black and plain; her attendants not too numerous; her dismay at first perfectly unaffected. A few tears balanced cheerfulness enough, and her presence ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Calculating their dividend on the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take them to England and to every other part of the world where their creditors might not find them, till they discovered that all the real capital left at their command was hardly sufficient to pay back with the stipulated interest one-tenth ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Manila Bay superior to that of any other power. The German fleet had for a considerable part of the time since the destruction of the Spanish squadron been in a menacing attitude. The Germans were ostentatious in discourtesy during ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... tapering away through topmast, topgallant—mast, royal and skysail—masts, until they fined away into slender wands. The sails, that were loose to dry, were old, and patched, And evidently displayed to cloak the character of the vessel, by an ostentatious show of their unserviceable condition, but her rigging was beautifully fitted, every rope lying in the chafe of another being carefully served with hide. There were several large bushy—whiskered fellows lounging about the deck, with their hair gathered into dirty net bags, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... ordination-feast, even as detailed by the complaining "Countryman," does not seem to me very reprehensible. The standing of the church, the wealth of the congregation, the character of the guests (among whom were the Governor and the judges of the Superior Court) all make this repast appear neither ostentatious nor extravagant. Fifty pounds was certainly not an enormous sum to spend for a dinner with wine for over one hundred persons, and such a good dinner too. Nor is it probable that a city as large as was Boston at that date could through that dinner ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... not the only theater of his ostentatious devotion. In Binondo, in Pampanga, and in the town of San Diego, when he was about to put up a fighting-cock with large wagers, he would send gold moneys to the curate for propitiatory masses and, just as the Romans consulted the augurs before a battle, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... boards, open to the wind from the street, standing in a double row which gives the boulevard the aspect of a foreign market place. There are to be found the real interest, the poetry of New Year's gifts. Luxurious in the Madeleine quarter, less ostentatious toward Boulevard Saint-Denis, cheaper and more tawdry as you approach the Bastille, these little booths change their character to suit their customers, estimate their chances of success according to the condition of the purses of the passers-by. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... manner—by swagger and covert sneer and ostentatious triumph of alleged possession emanating an unwearied challenge to my manhood. My revolver practice, I might mark, moved him to shrugs and flings; when he hulked by me he did so with a stare and a boastful grin, but ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... concert with the Pharisees in the effort to convict the Lord Jesus and bring Him to death.[182] The Galileans or people of Galilee were distinguished from their fellow Israelites of Judea by greater simplicity and less ostentatious devotion in matters pertaining to the law. They were opposed to innovations, yet were generally more liberal or less bigoted than some of the professedly devout Judeans. They were prominent as able defenders in the wars of the people, and won for themselves ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... man must be a profound calculator to be a consummate dresser. One must not dress the same, whether one goes to a minister or a mistress; an avaricious uncle, or an ostentatious cousin: there is no diplomacy more subtle than ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... anything for me now—not even give yourself the trouble to write out a cheque for fifty pounds, though it would not take you a minute." Two great tears overflowed as she spoke, and she raised her handkerchief with ostentatious slowness to dry them. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of millions; he has palaces in this country and abroad. His domination over the lives of the thousands who slave in his foundries is kept unshaken by reason of the fact that he coats the bitter acts of oppression of which he is constantly guilty, with ostentatious gifts in the name of benevolence. He presents the cities of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... m. pl. antipodes antojar vr. (with personal dative) to have a fancy or desire. anudar to knot. anunciar to announce. anadidura addition; por —— in addition. anadir to add. ano year. apagar to extinguish, dim. apalear to drub, beat with a stick. aparatoso ostentatious, magnificent. aparecer to appear. aparejar to prepare. aparente apparent. aparicion apparition, appearance. apariencia appearance. apear vr. to alight. apellido name, surname. apenas hardly. apero agricultural implements. apestar to infect, smell. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... in stained glass, taken the places of the humble, unpretentious meeting-houses, the thoughtful and judicious will sigh for those times of primitive simplicity, when an humble heart was more than an ostentatious offering, and God's word was listened to devoutly on hard seats instead of being dozed ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... John's son, Henry III., was King of England. While this vain, irresolute, ostentatious king was extorting money for his ambitious designs and extravagant pleasures, and struggling to get back the pledges given in the Great Charter, new and higher forces, to which he gave no heed, were at work ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... himself of this charge, not as the guardian of the royal family, but rather as their jailer,[1] placing his sentries so as to be spies and a restraint upon all their movements, and seeking every opportunity to gain an ignoble popularity by an ostentatious disregard of all their wishes, and of all courtesy, not to say decency, in his behavior to them.[2] And these considerations led the king, not only to authorize the Baron de Breteuil, who, as we have seen, had fled from the country in the previous year, to treat with any foreign ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... inhabited by high-bred people. There were pink linings to lace curtains at the windows, and quantities of green vines drooped from the balconies, as if to attract attention from the passers-by. Madame Strahlberg, with her ostentatious and undulating walk, which caused men to turn and notice her as she went by, went swiftly up the stairs to the second story. She put one finger on the electric bell, which caused two or three little dogs inside to begin barking, and pushed Jacqueline in before her, crying: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and poultry. Some of the rajas are supposed to have amassed a sum equal to ten or twenty thousand dollars, which is kept in ingots of gold and silver, much of the latter consisting of small Dutch money (not the purest coin) melted down; and of these they make an ostentatious display at weddings ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now! I do not expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are your own, and ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... none of the ejected should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... do great things for Athens if he obtained it. It was just to prevent the revelation of these facts that he thought it inadvisable that the ambassadors should go to any of the cities; while for their part, they sought to gratify him in everything, with ostentatious and extravagant obsequiousness. {161} But when all this is proved against them—their waste of time, their sacrifice of your position in Thrace, their complete failure to act in accordance either with your decree or your interests, their lying report to you—how is it possible that ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... around and see the happiness here, even among the poorer classes, and that too in a country where the soil is not at all to be compared with our own, I mourn for our down-trodden countrymen, who are plundered, oppressed, and made chattels of, to enable an ostentatious aristocracy to vie with ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... beneath the sleeves of her pink gingham dress, her thin knees outlining beneath the scanty folds of the skirt. Her neck was long, her shoulder-blades troubled the back of her blouse at every movement. She was a creature full of ostentatious joints, but the joints were delicate and rhythmical and charming. Annie had a charming face, too. It was thin and sunburnt, but still charming, with a sweet, eager, intent-to-please outlook upon life. This last was ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that a thing shall be, if it but appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long years, Glory, and Wealth, and Power, and Fame, and Name, Which generally leave some flowers to bloom Even o'er the grave, I have nothing left, not even A little love, or friendship, or esteem, No, not enough to extract an epitaph From ostentatious kinsmen; in one hour I have uprooted all my former life, And outlived everything, except thy heart, The pure, the good, the gentle, which will oft 110 With unimpaired but not a clamorous grief[fs] Still keep——Thou ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and tones the ageing courtesan would receive from the wife and children of the concierge! But beneath these conventional fictions the truth was that the concierge held the whip. At last he was using it. And he had given himself a half-holiday in order to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious furniture and the crimson lampshades. This was one of the dramatic crises in his career as a man of substance. The national thrill of victory had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the law. The emotions of the concierge were entirely ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... not the correct way of speaking, to say that Wordsworth is as proud as Lucifer; but, inversely, to say of Lucifer that some people have conceived him to be as proud as Wordsworth. But, if proud, Wordsworth is not haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of descending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous of Archimedes if he now walked upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton? Nature does not ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... tempers His dispensations to the young, and all the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true, there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the chapel itself, a scent of carrion makes you start. You look, against the will of your smart and ostentatious guide, through a half-open door, and see another sight—a room, dark and foul, mildewed and ruinous; and, swept carelessly into a corner, a heap of dirt, rags, bones, waifs and strays of every kind, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... affection, and disposition of my country to serve me, and I should be hurt, if, by declining the acceptance of it my refusal should be construed into disrespect or the smallest slight upon the generous intention of the legislature, or that an ostentatious display of disinterestedness of public virtue ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the unendurably long meal, served with ostentatious profusion, was at an end. Miss Meadowcroft rose with her ghostly solemnity, and granted me ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... sky, and the broken arches and walls were covered with thick ivy and wall flowers. The pedlar sat on a large gray stone, with his red cap on and his brown fingers adorned with splendid rings, and he spread them out and waved his hands to the people with ostentatious ceremony. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... reception, and had any idea of the changes in the castle reached the ears of the aforesaid patriarchs, they would probably have changed their minds in regard to Giovanni's economy. The Saracinesca were not ostentatious, but they spent their money royally in their own quiet way, and the interior of the old stronghold had undergone a complete transformation, while the ancient grey stones of the outer walls and towers frowned as gloomily as ever upon the valley. Vast halls had been ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the affection, and disposition of my country to serve me; and I should be hurt, if by declining the acceptance of it, my refusal should be construed into disrespect, or the smallest slight upon the generous intention of the legislature; or that an ostentatious display of disinterestedness, or public virtue, was the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... ceremonies with great parade and pomp is usually more of a vain and ostentatious display than an act of respect towards the dead; at the same time, any meanness or parsimony is in bad taste. The expenses should be governed by the position of the deceased, and the ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... causing the world to refrain on that account from rendering obedience to its motive-power, which is, whether they will or no, interest. After all, it is singular enough to see sentiments of the most sublime abnegation invoked in favor of plunder itself. Just see to what this ostentatious disinterestedness tends. These men, so poetically delicate that they do not wish for peace itself, if it is founded on the base interest of men, put their hands in the pockets of others, and, above all, of the poor; for what section of the ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Christmases, and she had a purple veil wrapped around her head, to hide Heaven knows what deficiency. She examined the empty egg-nog glass, inquired what the evening paper had said about the weather, and then stalked into the dressing-room, and prepared, with much ostentatious creaking, to sit up ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for that purpose, and for two hours it is very gay. The ladies are all in white, and several English women insisted upon coming out on the deck in low-cut and short-sleeved gowns. It is said to be the latest fashion, and is not half as bad as their cigarette smoking or the ostentatious display of jewelry that is made on the deck every morning. Several women, and some of them with titles, sprawl around in steamer chairs, wearing necklaces of pearls, diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones, fit for only a banquet ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... distinguished merit, what was the best History of England for her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and value the greatest part of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Why should such a writer be so forgetful of human comfort, as to give any countenance to that dreary infidelity ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... partisans of the Bourbons, who, it was said, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. This was true, if the spirit of the restoration were to be measured by the parade of expiatory masses for the execution of royalists under the revolution, the ostentatious patronage of priests, the preference of returned emigres to well-tried servants of the republic and the empire, or the anticipated expulsion of landowners in possession of "national domains" for the purpose of dividing them among ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... to go into half-mourning, Parkinson," he remarked as they went along. "Thoughtful, and yet not ostentatious." ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Guenther, the lyric ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... near on either side. There was a great clump of hydrangeas on the small smooth lawn in front, and on the piazza stood a small table, covered with a dainty white cloth trimmed with lace, on which were laid, in ostentatious neatness, the evening paper and a couple of magazines. There were chairs, and palms in jardinieres stood on either side of the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of a modern legal document with the pretentious ignorance and hifaluting language of the so-called medical treatises of his day. There are many ear-marks of both lawyer and doctor in this curious composition, and we can imagine the ostentatious pride with which Garway circulated the learned sense and nonsense among patrons no ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... that should be shown without ostentation." Beatrice laughed. "And you are decidedly ostentatious at the present moment. It would interest mamma and me very much to know the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... you for the chosen companion of his wife, I, as your best friend, would say, begone, and speed you on your way; then as much pride, as much spirit as you will; but those who are conscious of possessing real spirit, should never be—seldom are—in a hurry to show it; that kind of ostentatious haste is undignified in ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... return for their gracious hospitality. The precious stone was described in the family documents, but Don Horacio's grandfather had not had the pleasure of seeing it, since it had disappeared during the course of centuries, as had so many riches swept away by the financial troubles of an ostentatious house. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... strikes not out will strike home. What was he to strike with? Ten years younger, Laetitia might have been the instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara she had the hue of Winter under the springing bough. He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by some ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it to the honor of God and the Holy Madonna. This blasphemous war must end; this atheistical and free-thinking king must be reduced, humbled, and cast down from the stage he has mounted with such ostentatious bravado. Silesia must be torn from the hands of this profligate robber and incorporated in the crown of our apostolic majesty of Austria. The holy Church dare not lose any of her provinces, and Silesia will be lost if it remains in the hands of this heretical king; he must be punished ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... my ostentatious display of indifference and perhaps felt apprehensive of the latent devil that he had aroused, but his inward comment, I doubt not, was: "We'll see who's going to be master here. He can feel the weight of my hand again, if he likes. We can't let a bad-spirited little boy have ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... by grave offences against the criminal law, but none which can insure itself against the affronts, enmities, wounded sensibilities, rankling grievances, occasioned by incivility and rudeness. Moreover, there are persons entirely free from vice, perhaps ostentatious in the qualities which are the opposites of vices, and not deficient in charitable labors and gifts, who cultivate discourtesy, are acrid or bitter in their very deeds of charity, and carry into every ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... in which I always take much interest, of experiencing great difficulty in obtaining the 'rapport,' as they term it. Dr. Mansfield frowned, shook his head and assumed an air of great doubt and perplexity. I was certain that there would be now an ostentatious display of the strip of paper, and sure enough, in a minute more the Medium, strip in hand, came over to my table, and shook his head ominously. He placed his left hand on the portion of the strip containing my question, and began tapping on it with his forefinger. 'Pray, tell ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... whole morning Pierre was seen animating the town-hall with his goings and comings. He was absolutely alone in the large, empty building, whose lofty halls reechoed with the noise of his heels. All the doors were left open. He made an ostentatious show of his presidency over a non-existent council in the midst of this desert, and appeared so deeply impressed with the responsibility of his mission that the doorkeeper, meeting him two or three times in the passages, bowed to him with an ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the hazards of the faro table; when he beholds the streets glittering with new equipages, palaces conjured up by the magic of speculation; tradesmen flushed with sudden success, and vying with each other in ostentatious expense; in a word, when he hears the whole community joining in the theme of "unexampled prosperity." let him look upon the whole as a "weather breeder," and prepare for ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... said the driver (who had been to town and read novels) as he sat sideways on the box, passing his hand from the top to the bottom of his long whip, and trying to show off his accomplishments—"that ostentatious German has procured three light bays, and when he drives out with his lady—-oh, my! At Christmas he had a Christmas-tree in the big house. I drove some of the visitors there. It had 'lectric lights; you could not see the like of it in the whole of the government. What's it to ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... ourselves, appeared to attract a very humble share of popular attention. The auctioneer was surrounded by perhaps a score of lookers-on—big fellows for the most part, of the true Western build, long in the leg, broad in the shoulder, and adorned (to a plain man's taste) with needless finery. A jaunty, ostentatious comradeship prevailed. Bets were flying, and nicknames. "The boys" (as they would have called themselves) were very boyish; and it was plain they were here in mirth, and not on business. Behind, and certainly in strong contrast to these gentlemen, I could detect ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this dial-plate; and when I asked him the reason, he said, 'It might do very well upon a clock which a man keeps in his closet; but to have it upon his watch which he carries about with him, and which is often looked at by others, might be censured as ostentatious.' Mr. Steevens is now possessed of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... by all means, the more of them the better, but use them temperately, sparingly. Do not think that a passage to be admirable must be studded with ostentatious terms. Consider the Gettysburg Address or the Parable of the Prodigal Son. These convey their thought and feeling perfectly, yet both are simple—exquisitely simple. They strike us indeed as being inevitable—as ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... extend it, will give me labor and pain, I can derive no advantage from it, nor will anything induce me to engage in it, except it be the prospect of rendering effectual service to the common cause. I make this declaration, not because I conceive it necessary to you, or from an ostentatious display of those motives, which actuate my conduct, but there may be persons to whom I am not so well known as I have the honor of being to your Excellency, and who from ignorance or interest might give to the present intentions ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... if I were to live on bread and water, if I were to wash the feet of the poor day by day, it would not be too great an humiliation; and the only reason I do not, is, that I have no call that way, it would look ostentatious. Gladly then will I hail an inconvenience which will try me without any one's knowing it. Far from repining, I will, through God's grace, go cheerfully about what I do not like. I will deny myself. I know that with His help what is in itself painful, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... loitering over the finishing touches of a picture. They were good-natured, jovial fellows, too, these Bohemian visitors, though they were more frequently than not highly scented with the odor of inferior tobacco, and rarely made an ostentatious display in the matter of costume, or were conspicuously faultless in the matter of linen; they failed to patronize the hairdresser, and were prone to various convivialities, but they were neither vicious nor vulgar, and they were singularly faithful ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that kind are such as it is not very easy to forgive. If he attacked great men, it has been said in his defence, he attacked those parts of their writings which were really objectionable. And, of course, nobody will deny that (for example) Wordsworth's wilful and ostentatious inversion of accepted rules presented a very tempting mark to the critic. But—to say nothing of Jeffrey's failure to discharge adequately the correlative duty of generous praise—it must be admitted that his ridicule seems to strike pretty much at random. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... said Mr. Venn, with ostentatious sentiment. "But the main reason why I am biding here like this is that I want to wait till the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... not resist a worrying anxiety about the future of the British Provinces, which not even the remembrance of their hostility to us during our mortal strife with the Rebellion could render agreeable. For I could not but feel that the ostentatious and unconcealable prosperity of "the States" over-shadows this part of the continent. And it was for once in vain that I said, "Have we not a common land and a common literature, and no copyright, and a common pride in Shakespeare and Hannah More and Colonel Newcome and Pepys's ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... giving less than others have done. Mr. A. is inclined to give L20, but waits to see if Mr. B. gives L25, in which case he will raise his intended L20 to L30. These tactics are adopted, not because either of the candidates desires to be lavish or ostentatious in his gifts, and still less from any vulgar desire for notoriety in itself. They are simply an element, almost vital under existing conditions, of a successful appeal to the electorate. They may be said to be of the psychological ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... all my hopes! Heart-rending word!—obedience? what's obedience? 'Tis fear, 'tis hate, 'tis terror, 'tis aversion, 'Tis the cold debt of ostentatious duty, Paid with insulting caution, to remind me How much you tremble to offend a tyrant So terrible as Douglas.—O, Elwina—— While duty measures the regard it owes With scrupulous precision and nice justice, Love never reasons, but profusely ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... crossed to her and spoke. She looked inexpressibly charming in her white cotton gown and neat straw sailor hat with black velvet band. There was nothing ostentatious about her dress, but it was always well cut and fitted her to perfection. She possessed a style and elegance ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... day, one would have said in the dark channels of downtown ways. In the chop house on John Street, lunch-time patrons came blustering in, wrapped in overcoats and mufflers, with something of that air of ostentatious hardiness that men always assume on coming into a warm room from a cold street. Thick chops were hissing on the rosy grill at the foot of the stairs. In one of the little crowded stalls a man sat with a glass of milk. It was ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... to doubt the veracity of tradition in these matters, an incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The house of an unpopular gentleman was assailed—not in the ostentatious manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble. Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that became mere chalk-marks at ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... instance, the wealthy baronet being a party principally concerned. The Doctor, therefore, like the eagle scenting the carnage, seized, at the first word, the huge volume of morocco leather which formed his case of portable instruments, and uncoiled before the Captain, with ostentatious display, its formidable and glittering contents, upon which he began to lecture as upon a copious and interesting text, until the man of war thought it necessary to give him a word ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... wretchedness and want presents itself to their view all the year round, without their ever once extending that aid which, to bestow in private, would afford them ten times as much heart-felt pleasure, and real satisfaction, as they can gain from their ostentatious annual newspaper fraud. I have given away four times the value of this said cow, every Christmas, for ten or fifteen years together, without having ever once had, or wishing to have, my name held up ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... had given Mrs. Hilary so much time to recover her poise that she could join in, and say that Anglo-Catholics were very ostentatious people, and only gave all that money which they had, undoubtedly, given at the recent Congress in order to make a splash and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the ministers and he came before them pale and trembling, declaring that his son had very nearly been assassinated the day before, near the palace. The mob had insulted him on account of the ostentatious luxury of his wife, whose house was hung with red velvet edged with gold fringe. This lady was the daughter of Nicholas de Camus, who arrived in Paris with twenty francs in his pocket, became secretary of state, and accumulated wealth enough to ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... make a cheerful or pleasant room. Red absorbs light and is also an irritant to the eyes and nerves, and, unless it is used with great skill, it is apt to look extremely commonplace and ugly or like an ostentatious hotel or public building. Few of us have large enough houses to make it possible to use red in great amounts, and it is well for the average person to shun it and remember that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a red wall will ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... career, as to what was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... causing pain and annoyance beyond calculation. Just imagine a Scotland Yard detective with such a delicate business to do. We have no Hamards here, no French geniuses who can reconstruct crimes by a kind of special sense. Can you not see the average detective blundering about with his ostentatious display of the obvious; his mind, which never traced a motive in its existence, trying to elucidate a clue? Well, it is the business of the Law to detect and punish crime. Let the Law do it in its own way, find its own clues, solve the mysteries given it to solve. Why ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have thought, that with inferior literature he displayed superior genius, and with less profundity more gaiety. He might have considered that the facility and vivacity of his pleasing compositions were preferable to that art, that habitual pomp, and that ostentatious eloquence, which prevail in the operose labours of Johnson. No one might be more sensible than himself, that he, according to the happy expression of Johnson (when his rival was in his grave), "tetigit et ornavit." Goldsmith, therefore, without any singular vanity, might ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... offend them, I tried to avoid all literary subjects. I confined my conversation to topics of common interest; but this gave greater offence than the most ostentatious show of learning, for they concluded that I would not talk on such subjects, because I thought them incapable of understanding me. This was more wounding to their self-love than the most arrogant assumption on my part; and they ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... others he learnt to laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his abilities were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... His grateful prospect had formerly been Richard's marriage—the culmination of his System. Richard had destroyed his participation in that. He now looked for a pretty scene in recompense:—Richard leading up his wife to him, and both being welcomed by him paternally, and so held one ostentatious minute in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Pulci or Ariosto." We much admire Pulci and Ariosto, especially Ariosto, but they and their dissimilar images have no business here; and were Dr Joseph alive any where in the neighbourhood, we should whistle in his ear not to be so ostentatious in displaying his Italian literature, which was too thin to keep ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... last bar of peanut brittle and made sure that no vestige remained of the box of assorted chocolates which had preceded it down the Great Hungry Way, assembled three comic weeklies and four magazines, gave the porter a quarter for his ostentatious devotions and descended at the station, with exactly seven cents in his pocket, having calculated his budget ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... forefathers to surround themselves with beautiful things, and any but the simplest comforts. Some people are of that opinion still, but I do not agree with them. Your own good sense will be the best criterion of what is unduly ostentatious; but never hesitate to have anything you may wish because you fear the verdict of others. In short, be independent, and think for yourself if you wish to be happy. Your Aunt Helen has undertaken the charge of your wardrobe; ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... rendered him unjust toward that gentleman, whom he endeavored to eclipse by his splendid dress. But with his simple Musketeer's uniform and nothing but the manner in which he threw back his head and advanced his foot, Athos instantly took the place which was his due and consigned the ostentatious Porthos to the second rank. Porthos consoled himself by filling the antechamber of M. de Treville and the guardroom of the Louvre with the accounts of his love scrapes, after having passed from professional ladies to military ladies, from the lawyer's dame to the baroness, ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wished to erect to him, and he ridiculed the follies of an enlightened nation that could pay adoration to cold inanimate pieces of marble. His public entry into Rome gained him the hearts of the people; for he appeared on foot, and showed himself an enemy to parade and ostentatious equipage. His wish to listen to the just complaints of his subjects, caused his royal abode to be called "the public palace"; and his people learned to love him as greatly as ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... course, a wedding as ostentatious as possible. Old Hasluck knew how to advertise, and spared neither expense nor labour, with the result that it was the event of the season, at least according to the Society papers. Mrs. Hasluck was the type of woman to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of Dickens was not at first, or at any time, an unkind one. He erred from thoughtlessness only. What led him to the subject at all, he has himself stated. Hunt's philosophy of moneyed obligations, always, though loudly, half jocosely proclaimed, and his ostentatious wilfulness in the humouring of that or any other theme on which he cared for the time to expatiate,[165] had so often seemed to Dickens to be whimsical and attractive that, wanting an "airy quality" for the man he invented, this of Hunt occurred to him; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... If some ostentatious person had come to this strangely quiet spot and raised a staring, big house, the sight of it in the landscape would have made it impossible to have such a feeling as I have described—this sense of man's harmony and oneness with nature. From how much of England has this expression ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... the mountains; the contrast between their manners is admirably sustained: Cleon is rough, inclined to be rude and scoffing, totally without tact, even where his mistress is concerned. Lalus remembers her upbringing and her tastes; he makes no unnecessary or ostentatious display of wealth; his gifts are simple and charming, while Cleon's are so grotesquely unsuited to a swain, that it is tempting to suppose that Drayton was quietly satirizing Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd. Lirope ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... retorts followed between them, without any result. O'Connell half shuffled out of his expressions, but refused to apologise; the chairman (Bernal) took no notice, and the matter ended by a speech from Stanley and a few remarks upon it from Lord John Russell. The former stated his reasons for this ostentatious locomotion, which amounted to this: that he had been rudely treated in the House by ironical cheers and other intelligible sounds, and attacked by the Government newspapers, and he had, therefore, departed from a society for which he owned he was not fitted. It ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... seized by some of the new-fledged manhood, and a petticoat tied to his coat-tail. Even the green damask curtains and cushion-coverings that adorned the high, old-fashioned pulpit of the village church, were voted as ostentatious and calculated to foster luxurious idleness in the pastor; and a committee appointed and authorized to tear them from their places and sew them into bloomers for the comfort of the lady-lecturers, whose callings exposed them to the most inclement weathers. And so green-legged Philanthropy ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... than this was the breaking down of the morals of the country at large, resulting from the sudden building up of ostentatious wealth in a few large cities, and from the gambling, speculative spirit spreading from these to the small towns and rural districts. From this was developed an even more disgraceful result,—the decay of a true sense of national good faith. The patriotism which ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... that labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... although but twenty-eight years of age, was already regarded as a brilliant general and an accomplished courtier. Vain and ostentatious, yet possessed of more real military ability than his unfortunate Italian campaign of 1556 would seem to indicate, he won laurels at Metz, at Calais, and at Thionville.[543] Outside of the pursuits of war he was grossly ignorant, and in all civil ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... The spirit of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will probably never return, or, if it should, it will come as a folk-spirit, neither springing from nor governed by the colleges, but carrying them along with it. Hence, our colleges may content themselves with playing a less ostentatious part, and the most zealous alumnus need not think less of his alma mater for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... knowledge or learning they may happen to possess. I own, with submission, that I do not see either the necessity or propriety of this advice. For if a young lady has that discretion and modesty, without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more, than on ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... have his liberalities known and published to the world; while the marquis carefully concealed his gifts, and expressed uneasiness when they were known or blazed abroad; being more anxious to serve the necessities of those to whom he made them, than to make an ostentatious display of his munificence. One example of this is worthy of being mentioned. He learnt that one of his soldiers had lost a horse, on which occasion he went to a tennis-court belonging to his house, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... the Gothic manner, with a fine facade and sculptures of a certain merit, but it fails to impress itself on the town, which is altogether alien from it, modern for the most part in the vulgar way of our time, when ornament is a caprice of the rich and merely ostentatious, the many living, without beauty or light, in barracks or huts of a ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... their business—while a few felt an impulse to aid the man, but hesitated in being foremost in doing that which would be honourable to their feelings, but might not accord with their condition, or might seem as the ostentatious display of unusual benevolence. Where men are congregated, conduct must be regulated by the touchstone of public opinion; and, although it is the fashion of New-York to applaud acts of charity, and to do them too in a particular manner—it is by no means usual to run to the assistance of a fellow ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... traditions. On the one side these traditions have weighted the word "lust"—considered as expressing all the manifestations of the sexual impulse which are outside marriage or which fail to have marriage as their direct and ostentatious end—with deprecatory and sinister meanings. And on the other side these traditions have created the problem of "sexual abstinence," which has nothing to do with either asceticism or chastity as these have been defined in the previous chapter, but merely with the purely negative ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... deafened him; a hundred unhappy odors made him wince. Then, as he fought his way, the streets grew a trifle wider; as he approached the Forum the shops became more pretentious; at last he reached his destination in the aristocratic quarter of the Palatine, and paused before a new and ostentatious mansion, in whose vestibule was swarming a great bevy of clients, all come in the official calling costume—a ponderous toga—to pay their respects to the great man. But as the inner door was pushed aside by the vigilant keeper, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... suppose that a Frenchman is afraid of them?" and so, with an ostentatious sign of the cross, he took his place upon his knees beside the others. Foul, bedraggled, and wretched, the seven figures knelt and waited humbly for their fate under the ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the little cynic would get, becoming rather more scarlet, however, over the process of reflection than was quite compatible with the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then a sudden inward restlessness would break through, and she would spend a passionate hour pacing up and down, and hungering for the moment when she might avenge upon herself and him the week of silly friendship he had found it necessary ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been brought up in complete liberty and servitude is the greatest ill he understands. He pities these miserable kings, the slaves of all who obey them; he pities these false prophets fettered by their empty fame; he pities these rich fools, martyrs to their own pomp; he pities these ostentatious voluptuaries, who spend their life in deadly dullness that they may seem to enjoy its pleasures. He would pity the very foe who harmed him, for he would discern his wretchedness beneath his cloak of spite. He would say to himself, "This man ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... govern the exact conditions. Very often guests, both men and women, unable to estimate correctly what amount is befitting the servants' services, tip lavishly and without any regard for services. This borders on the ostentatious, and ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... individuality, there has been, as all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the community—the preponderating, voting portion—against another—the more ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid growth,—production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher than greed and individual aptitude for acquisition. I ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... large salle a manger, where a very numerous company were assembled—twenty-five or thirty in all. They were, apparently, people of rank-certainly of high breeding—although their habiliments, I thought, were extravagantly rich, partaking somewhat too much of the ostentatious finery of the vielle cour. I noticed that at least two-thirds of these guests were ladies; and some of the latter were by no means accoutred in what a Parisian would consider good taste at the present day. Many females, for example, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... down our barricades; but for the poor Cretans there was no change,—the Turks were so fully persuaded that England was with them that the severities towards the Christians underwent no amelioration, unless it be that the ostentatious brutality ceased, as the chiefs knew that they must keep up appearances. We attended service on Sunday on board the Arethusa and stayed to luncheon, in the midst of which an orderly came down and whispered ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... face of your sister Charlotte at her side. Do you notice with what ostentatious obedience and attention she devotes herself to ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... echoed Santos, with a smile and a shake of the head; a suspicious tolerance, an ostentatious truce, upon his parchment face. And already he was sufficiently relieved to suck ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... for compliments; give oneself airs &c. (assume) 885; boast &c. 884. render vain &c. adj.; inspire with vanity &c. n.; inflate, puff up, turn up, turn one's head. Adj. vain, vain as a peacock, proud as a peacock; conceited, overweening, pert, forward;, vainglorious, high-flown; ostentatious &c. 882; puffed up, inflated, flushed. self-satisfied, self-confident, self-sufficient, self-flattering, self-admiring, self-applauding, self-glorious, self-opinionated; entente &c. (wrongheaded) 481; wise in one's own conceit, pragmatical[obs3], overwise[obs3], pretentious, priggish; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... into the performance of his duties; to prevent him from being unjust and mischievous demanded a tightened curb.[2103] All sense of conviction, under this regime, had died out; no body would serve gratis as in 1789;[2104] nobody would work without pay; disinterestedness had lost all charm; ostentatious zeal seemed hypocrisy; genuine zeal seemed self-dupery; each looked out for himself and not for the community; public spirit had yielded to indifference, to egotism, and to the need of security, of enjoyment, and of self-advancement. Human materials, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dollars. The morning light showed fine copper. Here free metal was distinctly traceable in the scori, and it was the first time that we had seen slag so carelessly worked. Not a little merriment was caused by the ostentatious display of "gold-stones," marked by M. Philipin's copper-nailed boots. Sulaymn, the Bedawi, had killed a Wabar, whose sadly mutilated form appeared to be that of the Syrian hill coney: these men split the bullet into four; "pot" at the shortest distance, and, of course, blow to pieces ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... shows the democratic side of Mr. Cushing's character. He had also an aristocratic side. During General Grant's administration, a Mr. Kennedy, who had been a merchant at Troy, New York, came to Washington and distinguished himself by his somewhat ostentatious entertainments to diplomats and other notable persons. This proceeding annoyed Mr. Cushing, and he gave voice to his feelings in this manner: —"Mr. Kennedy, an ironmonger, comes here from Troy and sets himself up as a personage. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... dumb as Injuns," declared Cacta, preening herself, while the Messrs. Yellett reapplied themselves to their dinner with ostentatious interest. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... middle-aged buildings, low and small and dun-coloured, exactly like those of every other French-Algerian settlement, but big new blocks of glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists, save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all that would otherwise have been banal. Noise was everywhere, loud, shrill, insistent; ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... what extent the style of living which he presented stands out in striking contrast to the ostentatious manner of the Persian. (1) In the first place, if the latter made a solemn affectation of being but seldom seen, Agesilaus delighted to live in the eye of day, believing that seclusion might accord well enough as a screen for shameless conduct, but to a life of nobleness and ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... so they made their way from the rathskeller into the sunlight. The Polo Club occupied a magnificent modern building in a prominent location. They passed in at a door which was opened by a man in uniform, ostentatious in its soberness; at the end of a room, rich in rugs and paintings, they encountered ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... introducing that minister's opinion of his importance. "'My time is quite at your service, General,' although the poor dear Marquess used to say, 'Mr. Stapylton Toad, your time is mine.' He knew the business I had to get through!" The family portraits also, in ostentatious frames, now adorned the dining-room of his London mansion; and it was amusing to hear the worthy M.P. dilate upon his likeness ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... denunciation of ostentatious "churchiness" and "goodness," and religious posing. It is a lesson needed as much today as in the time ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and from root to root, dodging in and out of his hiding-places, and watching all intruders with a suspicious eye. He has a very pert, almost comical look. His tail stands more than perpendicular: it points straight toward his head. He is the least ostentatious singer I know of. He does not strike an attitude, and lift up his head in preparation, and, as it were, clear his throat; but sits there on a log and pours out his music, looking straight before him, or even down at the ground. As a ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the old man's counsels prevailed, and the two friends, with grave, pallid, but determined faces, came out into the sunshine, and with much deliberation and somewhat ostentatious calm proceeded to where the orderly ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... Venice offers only an apparent exception to this rule, for there the 'nobili' led the same life as their fellow-citizens, and were distinguished by few honorary privileges. The case was certainly different at Naples, which the strict isolation and the ostentatious vanity of its nobility excluded, above all other causes, from the spiritual movement of the Renaissance. The traditions of medieval Lombardy and Normandy, and the French aristocratic influences which followed, all tended in this direction; and the Aragonese government, which ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But, though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... John Hawkins, one of the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his kindness in remembering a faithful ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home, and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing it for the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... spoken in a tone of humorous extravagance which piqued my curiosity. Behind the ostentatious deference with which he had raised his hat to the sky, beneath the respectful awe with which he spoke the lady's name, I detected irony and a spirit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... predictive spirit in the early career of great men, which urges them to make provision for greatness; and remote as is the condition of a captain of a smart frigate from the commander of fleets, yet the captain of the Alarm, though the least ostentatious of men, seems always to have had a glance towards the highest duties of the British admiral. "Time," says Franklin, "is the stuff that life is made of;" and as France is the antagonist with which the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Nelly's neighbourhood. The women ignored her altogether. Winslow set his teeth together and registered a mental vow to wring Rufus Hent's sunburned neck at the first opportunity. He escorted Nelly to the table and waited on her with ostentatious deference, while Mrs. Keyton-Wells glanced at him stonily and made up her mind to tell his mother when she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sudden. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Parnell on the one hand, and the Marquis of Salisbury and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach on the other, must have been equally unprepared for what has happened. The Queen, caring not to conceal her political predilections, hesitated not to give her ostentatious approval and powerful endorsement to Tory management by consenting to open Parliament, as she had previously done for Lord Beaconsfield after his return from Berlin. A phenomenally large and brilliant assemblage of dukes, marquises, earls and viscounts, at ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... because his name was Rupert. It seemed to them a name both affected and ostentatious. Besides, crop it as you might, his hair would assume the ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... to Theodora immediately upon her arrival; but, according to the agreement with the renegade, he limited his attentions to the mere phrases of gallantry and courtly good nature. This ostentatious shew of civility, however, did not arise from a generous disposition, but merely constrained necessity. The renegade was continually present to his thoughts, and though his superior in command he was forced involuntarily to yield that tribute of respect, which resolution ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... and though nothing about her home was ostentatious or over ornate, it was quietly and in the best ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... interested the girl; but recently two or three unusual events had touched her life, and her dread that Dic would speak of them, was rapidly growing into a fear that he would not. By the end of that first half-hour, her feminine vivacity monopolized the conversation with an ostentatious display of trivial details on small subjects, and she began to move toward his end of the log. Still Dic kept his place, ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... live in a country where everybody is an 'elector' of some sort, and candidates are plentiful, see the same things going on, in a little different dress, before our eyes. Absalom begins operations by dazzling people with ostentatious splendour. In better days Samuel had trudged on foot, driving a heifer before him, to anoint his father; and royalty had retained a noble simplicity in the hands of Saul and David. But 'plain living and high thinking' did not suit Absalom; and he had gauged the popular taste ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... saw also an asylum for the widows and children of decayed merchants. It is a wide, extended building, with a church in the centre. Russia contains numerous charitable asylums, generally well conducted. They are, however, not to be compared to the numberless ostentatious charities of which our beloved country, with all her shortcomings, may justly boast. Their carriage took the travellers to the top of the Sparrow Hills, which are of no great elevation. They slope steeply down to the Moscowa, which, after ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... at his desk copying from his Primer on to his slate. The easy, ostentatious way in which he glanced from slate to book was not lost upon Emmy Lou, who lost her place whenever her eyes left the rows of ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... while acting as "gooseberry"—a role usually assigned to her—between Virginia Piper and an exceptionally timid young surveyor, during a ramble she conceived a rare sentiment of humanity towards the unhappy man. After once or twice lingering behind in the ostentatious picking of a wayside flower, or "running on ahead" to look at a mountain view, without any apparent effect on the shy and speechless youth, she decoyed him aside while her elder sister rambled indifferently and somewhat scornfully on. The youngest Miss Piper leaped upon the rail ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with gushing and sympathising hands, and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.—One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicurism, along with a certain ostentatious boldness of taste which takes suffering lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all that is sorrowful and profound. There are "cheerful men" who make use of good spirits, because they are misunderstood on account of them—they wish to ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the American border-settlers or adventurers in Canada may be called, are invariably insolent, vulgar, and unbearable in their manners; whilst, away from the frontier, in the United States, the traveller observes no ostentatious display of Republicanism, no vulgar insolence to strangers, unless it be in the bar-room of some wayside tavern, where one is sometimes obliged, as elsewhere, to rest awhile, and where the frequenters may be expected to be not either polite ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... importance to materialistic effects. Plain living with high thinking is not so much of an American formula as one would wish. In the smart set of New York, and in other places mutatis mutandis, this shows itself in an appallingly vulgar and ostentatious display of mere purchase power. We are expected to find something grand in the fact that an entertainment costs so much; there is little recognition of the truth that a man who spends $100 where $10 would meet all the demands of good taste is not only ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... while the game was a dull one to see. Holding a pair of kings, Cutler won a little from Toussaint, who remarked that luck must go with the money of Uncle Sam. After a few hands, the half-breed began to bet with ostentatious folly, and, losing to one man and another, was joked upon the falling off of his game. In an hour's time his blue chips had been twice reinforced, and twice melted from the neat often-counted pile in which he arranged them; moreover, he had lost ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... habits, the ease and affability of his intercourse, his remarkable vivacity amidst severe labors, the cheerful and animating tones of his conversation, and his fast fidelity to friends. Some of us, also, can testify to his large and liberal charities, not ostentatious or casual, but systematic and silent,—dispensed almost without showing the hand, and falling and distilling comfort and happiness, like the dews of heaven. But we can testify, also, that in all his pursuits and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... of hypocrisy and religious pretence. No wise or good man will discredit religious teaching, but all such will look with suspicion, if not dread, and even disgust, on the statistics of prison piety—generally false and designing, in proportion as it is loud and ostentatious. The defects of the governor as a legislator were not taken into account. Mr. Gladstone indeed attempted to balance with much precision the merits of the patriotic six. He admitted that advice and assistance to the Queen might sometimes take ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... anything for the poor fellow myself, the ship having demanded my whole attention from the moment when the squall first struck us. Well, he is at rest; his troubles are over; I believe he was a true and devout Christian, though he never made any ostentatious parade of his religion; and God will surely be gracious to him and accept his service of faithfully discharged duty and ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... father, an old man of the world, saw that self-denial like this was no less perilous than his former triumphs. "Why do you not, my son," he said, "why do you not live as others live? There is a provocation in success, but there is a worse provocation in ostentatious abstinence. You might be taken for a Jew (he meant a Christian). Do not draw down the wrath of Jove." The young enthusiast was wise enough to take the hint. He at once dressed himself en mode, resumed a moderate diet, only indulging ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the state which he governed: perhaps he transmitted his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... covered my cheeks with kisses I realised that each kiss expressed the thought "She is gone; I shall never see her more." Papa had very little to do with us in Moscow, coming to us only at dinner time, and lost much in my eyes, with his ostentatious dress, his stewards, his clerks, and his hunting ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... "Vaquero Billy," charging them, full tilt, brought up his mustang on its haunches and rigid forelegs, with a sweeping bow of his sombrero, within a foot of their artfully simulated terror! In this way they at last reached the clearing in the forest, the church with its ostentatious spire, and the Reverend Mr. Windibrook's dwelling, otherwise humorously known as "The Pastorage," ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... easily be tied in a knot at the back of his head. Although he is the only European resident of Asterabad save a few Cossack attendants, he wears fashionable Parisian clothes, a wealth of watch-chain, rings, and flash jewellery, patent-leather shoes, and all the accompaniments of an ostentatious show of wealth and personal magnificence. His rooms are equally gorgeous, and contain large colored portraits of the Czar ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... for his total freedom from cant. He is a rough self-helping son of the wilderness; does not pretend to be what he is not. There is no ostentatious pride in him; but neither does he go much upon humility: he is there as he can be, in cloak and shoes of his own clouting; speaks plainly to all manner of Persian Kings, Greek Emperors, what it is they are bound to do; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fire was opened from about a hundred pieces of cannon and mortars; our light vessels immediately, in return, opened their fire upon the castle. Here was all the pompous circumstance and exciting reality of war, without its effects; for this ostentatious display was but a bloodless prelude to the wide and sweeping destruction which was soon to follow. The enemy's shot fell near enough to splash the water on board our ships: not relying upon any forbearance of the Swedes, they meant to have kept the mid channel; but when they perceived ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey |
