"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allows him to say anything and do anything, but laughs at him all the time. Bel-Kasem always brings the Sheikh some pretty present, and Khanouhen throws around him his powerful arm of protection. The slavish merchant and faithful sycophant always calls him Sultan, swears by the Sheikh's beard in his quarrels with the other merchants, and threatens all his rivals ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... bless, we magnify your names. The slave is he that serves not; his the crime And shame, who hails not as the crown of Time That House wherein the all-envious world acclaims Such glory that the reflex of it shames All crowns bestowed of men for prose or rhyme. The serf, the cur, the sycophant is he Who feels no cringing motion twitch his knee When from a height too high for Shakespeare nods The wearer of a higher than Milton's crown. Stoop, Chaucer, stoop: Keats, Shelley, Burns, bow down: These have no part with ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... syl.), a sycophant, in the court of Dionys'ius the Elder, of Syracuse. After extolling the felicity of princes, Dionysius told him he would give him experimental proof thereof. Accordingly he had the courtier arrayed in royal robes and seated at a sumptuous banquet, but overhead was a sword suspended ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... was a vulgar parvenu, a sycophant, a snob—heaven knows what. All wrong! For the true reading of his character one has to go back to the day when he was a ragged boy and the liveried coachman of the "bad Lord Raa" lashed at his mother on the road, and he swore that when he was a man she should have a carriage of her own, and then ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... natural history. Let us examine this individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... put ill-will between him and the royal family. And if Briennius bears no longer the fame of a rational man, and the renown of a good leader, he is deprived of both by following the advice of this artful sycophant." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... then, here?" he said, seeing the servant had disobeyed his instructions and was following close behind him. He alone out of those scores of servants, those hundreds of fawning nobles, those thousands of sycophant souls who had but lately cringed before him, now accompanied the late master of France as he turned to leave the house in which he no longer ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... gold were not facts of the universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to hear it. He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is almost always like Bagstock—a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is not any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes starting out of his purple face. He ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slaves in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamations of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant to maintain a charge of poison or magic against the insolent creditor, who is seldom released from prison until he has signed a discharge of the whole debt. And these vices are mixed with a puerile superstition which disgraces their understanding. They listen with confidence to the productions ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... strong temptation to it? hath he not acted so in like cases? Judge you, therefore, whether he did it not." Thus the close slanderer argueth; and a weak or prejudiced person is thereby so caught, that he presently is ready thence to conclude the thing done. Again: "He doeth well," saith the sycophant, "it is true; but why, and to what end? Is it not, as most men do, out of ill design? may he not dissemble now? may he not recoil hereafter? have not others made as fair a show? yet we know what came of it." Thus do calumnious tongues pervert the judgments of men to think ill ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various |
