"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of life. Difficult it is to maintain a just equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet this was the brief analysis of a devotee amongst the ancient Romans. Now, considering that the word religion is originally ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... And generals fight again their battles won. Spectres and furies haunt the murth'rers dreams; Grants, or disgraces, are the courtiers themes. The miser spies a thief, or some new hoard, The cit's a knight, the sycophant a lord. Thus fancy's in the wild distraction lost With what we most abhor, or covet most. But of all passions that our dreams controul, Love prints the deepest image in the soul; For vigorous fancy, and warm blood ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of Reprobation. He was now in a chrysalis state, putting off the worm, and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor. He was indemnifying himself for the court which he found it expedient to pay to the Ministers by exercising much petty tyranny within his own college. It would be unjust, however, to deny him the praise of having ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Basil Montagu and Mr. Hepworth Dixon, to inform us that judges in that day were ill paid, and that it was the custom to receive gifts. If Bacon had a defence to make and did not make it, he was a coward or a sycophant: if what he said is true, he was a dishonest man, an unjust judge. He was sentenced to pay a fine of L40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower at the king's pleasure; the fine was remitted, and the imprisonment lasted but two days, a result, no doubt foreseen, of his wretched confession. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not sure whether there was any wife ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Crabbe's wife, has given more delicate pictures of the clergyman as he appeared at the tea-tables of the time. He varies according to her from the squire's excellent younger brother, who is simply a squire in a white neck-cloth, to the silly but still respectable sycophant, who firmly believes his lady patroness to be a kind of local deity. Many of the real memoirs of the day give pleasant examples of the quiet and amiable lives of the less ambitious clergy. There is the charming Gilbert White (1720-1793) placidly studying ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... in his chair. His habitual violent spirit of contradiction rose up rebelliously in him, and he longed to give a sharp answer in confutation of the Cardinal's words, but there was a touch of the sycophant in his nature despite his personal pride, and he could not but reflect that Cardinals ranked above Archbishops, and that Felix Bonpre was in very truth a "prince of the Church" however much he himself elected to disclaim the title. And as in secular ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... a large number of idlers began to gather around, and listen to the altercation of words. None of them seemed disposed to interfere, although I saw that the mass were too much under the influence of Bully to say a word in our favor, while half a dozen sycophant curs boldly encouraged him in his course of aggression, and whispered to each other, that we should soon knuckle into "nuggets," when the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... more shalt thou wheedle for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant, thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... again I ask:—Were not these "old moral divines" the authors and compilers of the Homilies? If the Barrister does not know this, he is an ignorant man; if knowing it, he has yet never examined the Homilies, he is an unjust man; but if he have, he is a slanderer and a sycophant. ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... so gracious for real power, is any adventitious distinction from birth, station, or circumstances of brilliant notoriety. In reality, the public, our never-sufficiently-to-be- respected mother, is the most unutterable sycophant that ever the clouds dropped their rheum upon. She is always ready for jacobinical scoffs at a man for being a lord, if he happens to fail; she is always ready for toadying a lord, if he happens to make a hit. Ah, dear sycophantic old ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... which Emmeline's crow rose loud and clear, and as the waiter hastened away, suddenly transformed into a sycophant, poppa remarked, "I see you've got those hotel tickets, too. Let me give you a little pointer. Say nothing about it until next day. They are like that sometimes. In being deprived of the opportunity of swindling us, they feel that they've ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... well," Drexley answered, bitterly. "Living, like a sensible man, honestly by the labour of his brain, the friend and companion of men—not the sycophant of a woman. I ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... it was necessary that the Whigs should conciliate the Mountain. He was a pretentious, underbred, half-educated man, fluent with all the commonplaces of middle-class ambition, which are humorously called democratic opinions, but at heart a sycophant of the aristocracy. He represented, however, a large and important constituency, and his promotion was at first looked upon as a masterpiece of management. The Mountain, who knew Jorrocks by heart, and felt that they had ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... trader trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold; The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they're cold. But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... a domineering blusterer to his subordinates, but a cringing sycophant to those over him. Stanton's office was not a congenial ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... prove that the Anglican church holds them, and I will allow her to be an ally of despotism; but you shall bring your proofs from her canons, articles, and liturgy, not from the servants of court-chaplains, or the flatteries of those who forget the priest in the sycophant. Wolves and worldlings creep into every church. The apostolic age had its Demas, and ours has its Williams. Remember it has its Andrews too. But since your principles of freedom will be best exemplified by your ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... they desire to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slave in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamation of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant, instructed to maintain a charge of poison, or magic, against the insolent creditor; who is seldom released from prison, till he has signed a discharge of the whole debt. These vices, which degrade the moral character ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 "a foolish youth, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... condemn his theories the next. On one side of their natures, Leigh and Miss Wycliffe touched in sympathetic understanding; on the other, they were as far apart as the poles. No poor man, however civilised he may be, can range himself on the side of wealth, unless he is either a fortune hunter or a sycophant, and Leigh was neither. At the present moment he merely felt, with a sinking of spirit, the existence of an artificial barrier between them of which he had previously been ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... mother? He himself had given the opening. How easy for him to point to his predecessor's short tenure of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor's theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent.... Doggie stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... has learnt from infancy, and retains in the bodily memory: and he is particularly cautious, lest anything of the wild concupiscence prevalent in his spirit should discover itself. Hence every man who is not interiorly led by the Lord, is a pretender, a sycophant, a hypocrite, and thereby an apparent man, and yet not a man; of whom it may be said, that his shell or body is wise, and his kernel or spirit insane; also that his external is human, and his internal bestial. Such persons, with the hinder part of the head look upwards, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... aftermath in the way of private communion served well to sober and humble Sally in her own esteem. Outside the immediate field of her reverie she was now conscious of the words "sycophant" and "parasite" buzzing like mosquitoes about the head of some frantic wooer of sleep, elusive, pitiless, exasperating, making it just so much more difficult to concentrate upon this importunate problem of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... patrol; while my lord, who lay in the chamber above me, got out of bed and tripped to the window at the sound of every coach that chanced to pass through the street. H—, who was consummate in the arts of a sycophant, began to court my favour, by condoling my affliction, and assuring me, that the only method by which I could regain my liberty was a cheerful compliance with the humour of my lord. I was fully convinced of the truth of this observation; and, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... answer no good purpose, and as exhibiting an extraordinary degree of arrogance, by dictating to future parliaments, and prescribing to future ministers a mode of action to be adopted some thirty years hence. He remarked:—"None but a novice, a sycophant, a mere reptile of a minister, would allow this act to prevent him doing what, in his own judgment, circumstances might require at the time; and a change in the situation of the country might render ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... disrespect to his wife, although the Emperor's daughter; has 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 |
