"Boorish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and a fichu of the same crossed on her breast. I must say to you, my dear Melody, that it was from this first sight of her that I took the habit of observing a woman's dress always. A woman of any age taking pains to adorn herself, it has always seemed to me boorish not to take careful note of the particulars of a toilet. Mlle. de Ste. Valerie wore slippers of blue kid, her feet being remarkably slender and well-shaped; and a blue ribbon about her hair, in the manner ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... his hand and burst into his noisy, boyish laughter, so reminiscent of things rural and boorish, of the coarse, strong spirits of the happy-go-lucky, irresponsibles that work as field hands and wood-haulers. "By cracky, Grant, I just got sight of the remnants of that dig I gave you. It was a ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... although I am grateful enough, I know just why you have done all this. It is because she asked you to. And knowing that, I can't accept what you do for me as from a friend, for I don't feel friendly toward you in the least." His face flushed painfully. "I'm not trying to insult you or be boorish," he said; "I just want you to understand how I feel about it. And now that you know, I suppose you'd better let the matter go, although I'm much obliged to you for fixing ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... history of the movement in its palmy days—the brutal and cowardly baiting of a penalised class; the boorish insult to ideals held sacred by sensitive devotees; the deliberate cultivation of intra—parochial blood-feud; the savage fostering of hate for hate's own sake; the thousand squalid details of affray, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... responsibility, and the officer's constant necessity of maintaining an aspect of authority and dignity, before his men, had left refining marks upon his face, which distinguished it as a different sort from the countenances about him with their expressions of pathetic stolidity, or boorish shrewdness. In a word, although they knew old Elnathan Hamlin to be one of themselves, they instinctively felt that this son of his ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... different sorts of jokes, which proves the high value attached in Italy to all displays of wit. It appears that even practical jokes were not considered in bad taste, but that irreverence and grossness were tabooed as boorish. Mere obscenity is especially condemned, though it must be admitted that many jests approved of at that time would now appear intolerable. But the essential point to be aimed at then, as now, was the promotion of mirth by cleverness, and not by mere ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them naturally. A great many more women bore boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... by the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... stupid farmer gives to his patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a delicate, compact, penetrative punch with the toe of a tight-fitting gaiter,—addressed rather to the conscience than the shins, to the sensibilities rather than the senses. The kick masculine is coarse, boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. The kick feminine is expressive, suggestive, terse, electric,—an indispensable instrument in domestic discipline, as women will bear me witness, and not at all incompatible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... surroundings than the ordinary townsman of our day. Further, there was a community of interests, and many people collected together in the fortified villages, with the result that little by little they attained to an importance never acquired by the boorish French peasants or the German serfs; they bore arms, they had a common treasury, they elected their own magistrates, and whenever they went out to fight, it was to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... dog-fancier.... In short, Fate drove poor Tihon to drink drop by drop to the dregs the bitter poisoned cup of a dependent existence. He had been, in his time, the sport of the dull malignity and the boorish pranks of slothful masters. How often, alone in his room, released at last 'to go in peace,' after a mob of visitors had glutted their taste for horseplay at his expense, he had vowed, blushing with shame, chill tears of despair in his eyes, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... to give anything noxious or loathsome to those who were uncomfortable enough already, unless he was very sure it would do good,—in which case, he never played with drugs, but gave good, honest, efficient doses. Sometimes he lost a family of the more boorish sort, because they did not think they got their money's worth out of him, unless they had something more than a taste of everything he ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... very closely and threw a missile at him. He could not be sure what it was, as the object went wide of the mark; but he was so incensed that he made a virage, and drawing a small flask from his pocket, hurled it at his boorish antagonist. The flask contained some excellent port, he said, but he was repaid for the loss in seeing it crash on the exhaust-pipe ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... centuries that had elapsed since the days of Vergil the term 'pastoral' had gained a new meaning and new associations. In the days of Augustus Pan was a boorish anachronism; it was left to medieval Christianity to create a god who was in fact a shepherd of men[24] and so to render possible a pastoral allegory that should embody the dearest hopes and aspirations of the human heart. That Christian pastoralists ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorish manners, who was cutting a dash with ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Anne came in. She had been prepared by Martha for her visitor, and she came forward to him now with the dignity and kindly patronage of some lady abbess receiving the miscreant and boorish yokel of a neighbouring village. And yet how fine she was! As Maggie watched her, she thought of what she would give to have some of that self-command and dignity and decision. Was it her religion that gave her that? Or only her own self-satisfaction? No; ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... least once a week, and if the feet perspire they should be washed several times a week, as the case may require. It is not unfrequent that young men are seen with dirty ears and neck. This is unpardonable and boorish, and shows gross neglect. Occasionally a young lady will be called upon unexpectedly when her neck and smiling face are not emblems of cleanliness. Every lady owes it to herself to be fascinating; every gentleman is bound, for his own sake, to be presentable; but beyond this there ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Oscar Wilde's wax flowers of speech, nor the excessively stiff and conventionalized action of "Salome," that bores one with the Strauss opera of that name. It is not even the libretto of "Der Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... character was that of an overgrown country lout with boorish manners and silly mind. He did not and would not go to school, and he asserts now that if he had done so he "would have become as big a fool as other people." A shiftless fellow, left to his own ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... rules, nor even the names Of the Venusian bard, or critic sage Full-famed of Stagyra: whose clamorous tongues Stun the tormented ear with colloquy, Vociferate, trivial, or impertinent; Replete with boorish scandal; yet, alas! This, this! he must endure, or muse alone, Pensive and moping o'er the stubborn rhyme, Or line imperfect—No! the door is free, And calls him to evade their deafening clang, 80 By private ambulation;—'tis resolved: Off from his waist he throws the tatter'd gown, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... consisted in a capacity for affection. His hair, worn in ailes de pigeon, and duly powdered every morning by the barber from the Ecole Polytechnique, described five points on his low forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. Though his manners were somewhat boorish, he was always as neat as a new pin and he took his snuff in a lordly way, like a man who knows that his snuff-box is always likely to be filled with maccaboy, so that when Mme. Vauquer lay down to rest on the day of M. Goriot's installation, her heart, like a larded partridge, sweltered ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... cold tea into two little cups, when Monsieur Perrier made his appearance, his face begrimed and his shaggy hair uncombed. I had been used to the sight of rough men in Adelaide, on our sheep-farm, but I had never seen one more boorish. He stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands, and gazing at us unflinchingly with the hard stare of a Norman peasant, while he spoke in rapid, uncouth tones to his wife. I turned away my head, and shut my eyes to this ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... this puzzle? He the birthday-wit, For so we thought him—keener yet, if aught is so— Becomes a dunce more boorish e'en than hedge-born boor, If e'er he faults on verses; yet in heart is then 15 Most happy, writing verses, happy past compare, So sweet his own self, such a world at home ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... without saying that an officer does not drink with his men, though if he is a guest of honor at an organizational party where punch or liquor is being served, it would be a boorish act for him to decline a glass, simply because of this proscription. Sometimes in a public cocktail bar an officer will have the puzzling experience of being approached by a strange but lonely enlisted man who, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... But his inward anger is revealed in the contents itself of De servo arbitrio (On the Will not free). For here he really did what Erasmus had just reproached him with—trying to heal a dislocated member by tugging at it in the opposite direction. More fiercely than ever before, his formidable boorish mind drew the startling inferences of his burning faith. Without any reserve he now accepted all the extremes of absolute determinism. In order to confute indeterminism in explicit terms, he was now forced ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... through the little window, and who, several times, in despair, had threatened to shoot. Tsiganok would retort, coarsely and derisively, and the quarrel would end peacefully because the dispute would soon turn into boorish, unoffending abuse, after which shooting would ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... the people of Orbajosa may be rude and boorish rustics, without learning, or polish, or fine manners; but in loyalty and good faith we yield to no one—to no one, I ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think, that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak a ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brief warlike experience. There are brave men, and men whose courage is suspected; quiet men, and men of opinionated perversity; quick-witted men, and men whose profound stupidity makes them continual butts for all kinds of practical jokes; refined, educated, poetical men, and men of boorish habits. In short, any camp presents such specimens of humanity as would be furnished if all the ingredients of character and experience that compose the world had been collected in a huge pepper box and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sweetheart, you rude men. But I am friendless in your boorish town, and this is a friend; and one who knows, what you know not, how to treat ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... what if I could persuade her to let me be the man? And at the very thought, my head began to swim in the delirium of hope and almost unimaginable anticipation. And I said: Dear Tarawali, is it the fault of the ocean gem, if its boorish owner flings it away, taking it for a bit of common glass, and ignoring its inestimable worth? There are other and better judges, who would give their very lives, only to be allowed to pick ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish squires for understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... answered, rather testily, my temper rising slightly at what I considered the boorish familiarity of his tone and manner, which I determined to at once check—"what ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... convened for a special consultation, which, it was considered, the portents of the times demanded. Here was the aristocratic and haughty Brush, the host, and leading spirit of the party, with his florid face, cracking his jokes and ridiculing "the boorish settlers," in which he was sure to find a ready response in the boisterous laugh of Peters and other young supporters of the court and loyal party. Here, too, sat the fiery and profane Gale, the clerk of the court, with his thin, angular ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... a bear am I—that same Boorish animal you know; That gross, trampling brute am I Of your ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... with a more boorish air than he had before manifested, and muttered something about a cow that needed his attention, and that he could not spare the time from his herd for all that the Prioress was ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was the ungracious response, delivered in a gruff tone of voice. Old Stolliver was a boorish, cross-grained customer, who paid slight regard to the amenities, and did not ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... was a success. He was a good bear, but then, it was objected, he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing, signified nothing, simply stood there, snarling over his shoulder at nothing, and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that none were satisfied; they hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew two simple lines under his feet, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... civilization. They show that fashion, coming from the whole to the individual, adds nothing to the sense, judgment, or taste of the latter, but imposes on him a coercion to conform. He who dissents is thought rustic and boorish. He is more or less severely boycotted, which means not only that he is made to suffer, but that he loses important ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... in dressing as he pleased, and looked with contempt upon the studied attitudes and foppish attire of the French. The Parisian courtier, on the other hand, rejoicing in his ruffles, and ribbons, and practiced movements, despised the boorish manners, as he deemed them, of ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... gumption of a Kansas Gopher he would know that neither Mrs. Davis nor any other American woman made such "demand." Perhaps he did not know it,—if it be possible for the editor of such a quintessential extract of utter idiocy to know anything—but couldn't resist the boorish impulse to insult an aged woman, because he's built that way. The case of Senorita Cisneros appealed to the sympathy of every manly man and noble woman throughout the world—to every living creature within whose hide there pulses one drop of human blood unblended with that of unclean ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the truth of this final assertion, I call you to witness the sticks at the door, Where they make it a daily, a 'manly' diversion, To ogle each woman, and sometimes do more, Who passes the hotel that's named by a saint, Where boorish bad manners ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... and he was too wary to give him an opportunity. There was something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival. Ichabod became the object of whimsical persecution to Bones and his gang of rough riders. They harried his hitherto peaceful domains; smoked out his singing school by stopping up the chimney; broke into the schoolhouse at night, in spite of its formidable ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... to return, the whole personnel of the convent came to assist, with the inhabitants of a little village adjoining, which finds protection and Christian charity from the convent. The monks, excepting two or three, seemed of an ignorant and boorish quality, but hard-working and kind-hearted. Here, evidently, a certain kind of bliss was in ignorance, and the most learned were not wise enough to be accused of much folly. The Hegoumenos, in bidding us good by, begged us warmly to come again and stay long,—a month ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... such a silly reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that he had been induced to make them his models. "Whatever manners," says the emperor, "I may have previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it is impossible for me now to alter or unlearn. Habit is said to be a second nature; to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the study of more than thirty years is extremely difficult, especially when it has been imbibed with ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... were old schoolfellows who had met again after a long separation, Rodd delighted with his companion, and disposed to feel disappointed in himself lest the refined, polished young officer—one, evidently, of the haute noblesse—should look down upon him as a rough, rather boorish young Englishman. ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... than to march resoundingly through the streets, his legs thrust into Lasse's old boots—this was the essence of manliness. But he was man enough to abstain from so doing—for here such conduct would be regarded as boorish. It was harder for him to suppress his past; it was so inseparable from Father Lasse that he was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... them against our mariners. I found him and the president of their factory very impatient, calling us insolent English, threatening that our pride would have a fall, with many other disgraceful and opprobrious words.[134] Such was the entertainment we received from that boorish general, named Garrat Reynes, in his own house. He had formerly shewn the like or worse to Mr Ball, on going aboard his ship at Banda: And four of our men, who took passage with him from thence to Cambello, were brought all the way in the bilboes, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... peasant city without much fashion or style then, and this aspect has intensified itself. The peasant is the born enemy of the town, and whilst he may be perfect in the country he is a boorish and non-comprehending fellow when he comes to the capital to rule. The peasant in power has very little use for the brighter side of civilization. The more the latter is cut down the better for him. He has, unfortunately, grasped the truism that "without the peasant nothing ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... visit Jack went out regularly once every four weeks. He fell very naturally into the ways of the house, and although his manner often amused Alice Merton greatly, and caused even her father to smile, he was never awkward or boorish. ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... speaking of Clarendon Beverley!" he exclaimed, almost fiercely. "These Yankees have no respect for any thing on earth, but their own boorish selves." ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... manners be neither boorish nor blunt, but even these are preferable to simpering and crawling. I wish every English youth could see those of the United States of America; always civil, never servile. Be obedient, where obedience is due; ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see the "German soul" demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at German taste, at German arts and manners what boorish indifference to "taste"! How the noblest and the commonest stand there in juxtaposition! How disorderly and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul! The German DRAGS at his soul, he drags at everything he experiences. He digests his events badly; he never ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... intercourse' between the two men is 'contrary to all evidence.' She then infers that 'Bacon alone wrote all the plays and sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare.' So Bacon entrusted his plays, and the dread secret of his authorship, to a boorish cabotin with whom he had no 'close intercourse'! This is lady's logic, a contradiction in terms. The theory that Bacon wrote the plays and sonnets inevitably implies the closest intercourse between him and Shakespeare. They must have been in constant ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... them, handed down from their fathers, is by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages of mannerism, who, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes and fashion of the day into art, because to them everything like noble simplicity seems boorish and rude. The latter impropriety is now abolished: but, on the other hand, our poets and artists, if they would hope for our approbation, must, like servants, wear the livery of distant centuries and foreign nations. We are everywhere at home ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... villages, such a one as Chesterton in all respects, and one could have thought it in England but for the language of the people. We went into a little drinking house where there were a great many Dutch boors eating of fish in a boorish manner, but very merry in their way. But the houses here as neat as in the great places. From thence to the Hague again playing at crambo—[Crambo is described as "a play at short verses in which a word is given, and the parties contend who can find most rhymes to it."]—in the waggon, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... they miss it so much. For nothing gives you uneasiness which you do not miss. That was a fine answer of Sophocles to a man who asked him, when in extreme old age, whether he was still a lover. "Heaven forbid!" he replied; "I was only too glad to escape from that, as though from a boorish and insane master." To men indeed who are keen after such things it may possibly appear disagreeable and uncomfortable to be without them; but to jaded appetites it is pleasanter to lack than to enjoy. However, he cannot ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... with a self-conscious dignity and some chagrin at their boorish clatter, their absolute ignorance of discipline. "I shall ring the bell in ten minutes," she told them while they scuffled to the door. "I shall give you two minutes after the bell rings to get into your seats and be prepared for duty. Every ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... vices, they were gross and barbarous in theirs. They had neither so many ways nor so many means of sinning; but the sum of their moral turpitude was greater than ours. We have a sort of decency and good breeding, which lay a certain restraint on our passions; they were boorish and beastly, and their bad passions ever in full play. Civilization prevents barbarity and atrocity; mental cultivation induces decency of manners—those primitive times were generally without these. Who that knows them would wish such ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... made on this subject," said I, "is in comparing, as people generally do, a polished rascal with a boorish good man; but the polished rascal should be compared with the polished good man, and the boorish rascal with the boorish good man, and then we get the true value of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various |
