"Cant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Invective, yet I do not recollect that he has explicitly criminated him in either, nor do I believe it is in his Power. If no one steps forward to accuse him, why should his Integrity be doubted? Why should you, my Friend, express yourself in so languid a Tone, "I cant yet but have a great opinion of Dr Lee," and "rather than the Cause of America should be betrayd I would give up the dearest Connections I have on Earth." Has Dr Lee forfeited the good opinion you "always had" of him? Do you doubt ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... saints, you know, so you can't expect us to fall in with your views at once. Mother, of course, won't like it if you go against her plans for you; she will be very vexed, but she will eventually give in; but it's a different matter with father, and he is your guardian, remember. He hates "cant," as he calls it, and he has great ideas of your taking your position in society as you should. If you cross his will, I warn you you will bring the house down upon your ears; he never will stand any opposition. And what father will do by his authority, ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... hundred other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. We need some one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told by laymen that it ought to be,—a literature of the elementary school with the cant and the platitudes and the goody-goodyism left out, and in their place something of the virility, of the serious study, of the manful effort to solve difficult problems, of the real and vital achievements that are characteristic of thousands ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... He was not unduly distrustful of his fellow-men. He was not always suspecting them of something indistinguishable from fraud. When he wrote, "The world is still deceived with ornament" which "obscures the show of evil," he was expressing downright hatred—not suspicion—of sham, of quackery, of cant. His is the message of all commanding intellects which see through the hearts of men. Shakespeare's message is Carlyle's message or Ruskin's message anticipated by nearly three centuries, and more potently and ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Cant for religion, sounding words for truth, Fraud leads to fortune, gelt for guilt atones, No care for hoary age or tender youth, For widows' ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... had whispered tidings to him. He was, said Papa Isbister, immensely proud of his plaything, this huge gaunt sailor, who had been bent into the shape of a rainbow—the foot of a rainbow—by a chance shot, which shattered his hip and gave him an impressive forward cant, which appeared to women, it seemed—I quote my old friend—in the light of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the policemen as though it had been a feather: with one great stride he reached the countess and caught her roughly by the wrist. "Look at her, will you?" he cried: "you and the likes of you, with your smooth cant, have killed her! You crush us and starve us till we turn, and then you shoot us down like dogs. Leave my ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... farther out and fish awhile," Judith announced over her last trap. "I've got all my tackle aboard and maybe I can find something Mrs. Ben will want. You sit still as a mouse, Blossom, for I cant't be ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... of 1860 the white female population of the United States exceeded thirteen millions, and the aggregate negro population, of both sexes, was below four and a half millions. That great white population, and all its female predecessors, have never had the right of suffrage, or, to use that cant phrase of the day, have never been enfranchised; and such has also been the condition of the negro population. That about one negro in ten thousand in four or five States have been allowed to vote, is too insignificant to be dignified with any consideration as an exception. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... deductive philosophy, or the principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contemptible as the pseudoscientific cant which is talked about ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... wishes to say something on the subject of canting nonsense, of which there is a great deal in England. There are various cants in England, amongst which is the religious cant. He is not going to discuss the subject of religious cant; lest, however, he should be misunderstood, he begs leave to repeat that he is a sincere member of the old-fashioned Church of England, in which ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Group after group of laborers, peavies or cant-hooks on shoulders, were moving slowly past him toward the wharf. It was already nearly dark, and the arc lights on the elevator structure, and on the spouting house, beyond the tracks, were flaring. He started toward the wharf, walking behind ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... such as Hogs and Cows What theay call the Plage I Whent to your Aunt as you Wish Mee to Do But She Told Mee She Did not wont aney Boddy She Told Mee She Should Like to Come up to see you But She Cant Come know for she is Boddyley ill and Harry Donte Work there know But he Go up there Once in Two or Three Day Harry Offered is self to Go up to Live With your Aunt But She Made him know Ancer. I hay Been up to your Aunt at Work for 5 Weeks Hopping and Ragluting ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... which is founded on the family, is to-day giving only perfunctory and half-hearted attention to the family. The whole vocabulary of the institution has taken on such a quality of cant, that one almost hesitates to use the words "home" and "mother"! A girl's education should contain at least as much serious instruction on the relation of the family to Society as it does on the relation ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... progress of your work, there is nothing that you will have more frequently to be mindful of than your views with respect to self-advancement. To take one form of it, the acquisition of money. Money, as Charles Lamb, a great despiser of cant, observed, is not dross, but books, pictures, wines, and many pleasant things. Still I suspect that money is more sought after to gratify vanity, than to possess the means of enjoying any of the above named ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... some sense, to be shut out from common life and speech. This does not mean such common use of Biblical phrases in every day conversation as to cause it to grow into that form or irreverence known as cant, but it does mean simple usage of Bible thought, and the effort to fit it to the conditions of daily life. Such a habit in itself will force any family to discriminate as to what things in the Bible are living and eternal, and what things belong rightly to that far ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... with cant, ere we were born, For feasts of death, and hatred's harvest wain Piled high, for princes from proud mothers torn, And soft despairs hushed in ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... the body; not the body, but of the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul! Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls. I cannot say how they came nor whither they go, but we have them, and I see you ruining yours. I cannot bear it. It is again the darkness creeping in; it is hell." Then he checked himself. "What nonsense I have talked—how abstract ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... was all that was necessary to tempt the extremity of hunger, and stating that Adam and Eve, in 'Paradise Lost,' were too much like married people. He has furnished many a text for Coleridge to preach upon. There was no fuss or cant about him; nor were his sweets or sours ever diluted with ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Before God I must say that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it I am ashamed of my country. I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of liberty and equality; of our hypocritical cant about the inalienable rights of man. I would not for my right hand stand up before a European assembly, and exult that I am an American citizen, and denounce the usurpations of a kingly government as wicked and unjust; or, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... columns. "Sentimentalists!" he said as his eye caught an interjection. "Cant!" he added. Then he looked at Hylda, and remembered once again on whom and what his speech had been made. He saw that her face was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... abruptly, but piecemeal, those outward symbols—his sombre clothes. First 'twas his hat he exchanged for a feather-trimmed beaver of more sightly hue; then those stiff white bands that reeked of sanctity and cant for a collar of fine point; next it was his coat that took on a worldly edge of silver lace. And so, little by little, step by step, was the metamorphosis effected, until by the end of the week ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... dispersed position of his underlying harmonies. This in a footnote to the eleventh study of op. 10. Here one must let go the critical valve, else strangle in pedagogics. So much has been written, so much that is false, perverted sentimentalism and unmitigated cant about the nocturnes, that the wonder is the real Chopin lover has not rebelled. There are pearls and diamonds in the jewelled collection of nocturnes, many are dolorous, few dramatic, and others are sweetly insane and songful. I yield to none in ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... value to nations than gold and fleets and armies. All that we have lately seen done, and more, would have been done thirty years since, had any other man than Andrew Jackson been at that time President of the United States. There was much cant in those days about "the one-man power," because President Jackson saw fit to make use of the Constitutional qualified veto-power to express his opposition to certain measures adopted by Congress; but the best exhibition of "the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... sits up in his dream, or rises from his couch and walks, so all of a sudden Abel Keeling found himself on his hands and knees on the deck, looking back over his shoulder. In some deep-seated region of his consciousness he was dimly aware that the cant of the deck had become more perilous, but his brain received the intelligence and forgot it again. He was looking out into the bright and baffling mists. The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver; the sea below it was ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... art, the history of modern painting and the like, and be capable of guessing what a daring experimentalist like Mr Gordon Craig is aiming at and what relation his scene-pictures bear to the current cant of the art critic. It is deplorable when one finds serious critics gushing about the beauty of costly stage effects belonging to the standard of taste exhibited by wedding-cakes, Christmas crackers, old-fashioned valentines ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois—reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a rake ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... perhaps unrivaled. But the fingers can not express more than rests in the heart and brain to give to their skill, and Thalberg, with all his immense talent, seems to have lacked the divine spark of genius. It goes without saying, to those who are familiar with the current cant of criticism, that the word genius is often applied in a very loose and misleading manner. But, in all estimates of art and artists, where there are two clearly defined factors, imagination or formative power and technical dexterity, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... and I know a friend would be glad to take it, and I'd part it as ready as look at it—Any-thing at all, sure, rather than that he should be forced to talk of emigrating; or, oh, worse again, listing for the bounty—to save us from the cant or the jail, by going to the hospital, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... given to his clerical office, who was simply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his point of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... meal on others' wit: 'Tis changed, no doubt, from what it was before; His rank digestion makes it wit no more: Sense, past through him, no longer is the same; For food digested takes another name. I pass o'er all those confessors and martyrs Who live like S-tt-n, or who die like Chartres, Out-cant old Esdras, or out-drink his heir, Out-usure Jews, or Irishmen out-swear; Wicked as pages, who in early years Act sins which Prisca's confessor scarce hears. Even those I pardon, for whose sinful sake Schoolmen new tenements in hell must make; Of whose strange crimes no ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... here" said Cyril "you cant get round me like that, I know something is wrong, you might ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... the hells yawn for their prey, and opera-singers and fiddlers—creatures hatched from gold, as the dung-flies from the dung-swarm, and buzz, and fatten, round the hide of the gentle Public In the cant phase, it was "the London season." And happy, take it altogether, happy above the rest of the year, even for the hapless, is that period of ferment and fever. It is not the season for duns, and the debtor glides about with a ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... warre he proues it plaine when we entered his ship, A prisner therefore I remaine, and hence I cannot slip Till that my ramsome be agreed vpon, and paid, Which being leuied yet so hie, no agreement cant be made. And such is lo my chance, the meane time to abide A prisner for ransome in France, till God send time and tide. From whence this idle rime to England I doe send: And thus till I haue further ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... spoiled so many, men as well as women. Her mind was admirably balanced by her home affections, which remained unsullied and unshaken to the end of her days. She had, in common with her three brothers and her charming sister, the advantage of a wise and loving mother—a woman pious without cant, and worldly-wise without being worldly. Mrs. Porter was born at Durham, and when very young bestowed her hand and heart on Major Porter; an old friend of the family assures us that two or three of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... February 1784 he gave her another guinea for a letter relating to himself that he had found in the pocket-book (ante, iv. 262). A writer in the Gent. Mag. for 1799, p. 1171, who had been employed in Strahan's printing-works, says that 'Stewart was useful to Johnson in the explanation of low cant phrases; all words relating to gambling and card-playing, such as All-Fours, Catch-honours [not in Johnson's Dictionary], Cribbage [merely defined as A game at cards], were said to be Stewart's ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... say more. Let the British reader study and enjoy, in simplicity of heart, what is here presented him, and with whatever metaphysical acumen and talent for meditation he is possessed of. Let him strive to keep a free, open sense; cleared from the mists of prejudice, above all from the paralysis of cant; and directed rather to the Book itself than to the Editor of the Book. Who or what such Editor may be, must remain conjectural, and even insignificant:[1] it is a voice publishing tidings of the Philosophy ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... I hate all cant, but am satisfied that the chief reason why France does not succeed better in her revolutions is, because she lacks the steadiness which a sincere devotion to religion gives to a nation. The country needs less man-worship and more God-worship. It needs ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... But, against the cant of the bigot or the hypocrite, no reasoning can aught avail. If you would argue until the end of life, the infallible creature must alone be right. So it proved with the laird. One Scripture text followed another, not in the least connected, and one sentence of ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... make you dishonest," he stabbed. "No man seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves to be called encouragement, and by God is encouragement," he went on furiously. "Let's cut away some of the cant before we ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... every social gathering on Founder's Day afterward, as long as Mr. Cornell lived, he had arrangements made for dancing. I never knew a man more open to right reason, and never one less influenced by cant or dogmatism. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking—an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer—tonk-tonk-tonk; then the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... This was the cant with which Viglius was ever ready to feed not only his faithful Hopper, but all the world beside. The president was naturally anxious that the fold of Christ should be entrusted to none but regular shepherds, for he looked forward to taking one of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Le Moyne. Several who were there have expressed the opinion that, from the manner in which the shooting was done, it must have been by a man with one arm. However, Eliab will make a good Radical show, and we shall have another dose of Puritanical, hypocritical cant about Southern barbarity. Well, we can bear it. We have got the power in Horsford, and we mean to hold it. Niggers and nigger-worshippers must take care of themselves. This is a white man's country, and white men are going to ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of an inch and she will yaw five miles to port or starboard ere she is under control again. Give her full helm and she returns on her track like a whip-lash. Cant the whole forward—a touch on the wheel will suffice—and she sweeps at your good direction up or down. Open the complete circle and she presents to the air a mushroom-head that will bring her up all standing ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... stanzas; but the failure of the two first has weakened my estro, and it will neither be so good as the two former, nor completed, unless I get a little more riscaldato in its behalf. I understand the outcry was beyond every thing.—Pretty cant for people who read Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, and the Bath Guide, and Ariosto, and Dryden, and Pope—to say nothing of Little's Poems! Of course I refer to the morality of these works, and not to any pretension ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the Holy Spirit, which is so conspicuously slighted, will be the next in order; and then the way will be open for a proposition to recognize the 'Vicegerent of Christ on earth,' as the true source of power among the nations! If the proposed amendment is anything more than a bit of sentimental cant, it is to have a legal effect. It is to alter the status of the non-Christian citizen before the law. It is to affect the legal oaths and instruments, the matrimonial contracts, the sumptuary laws, &c., &c., of the country. This would be an ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... there is one habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards,—worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,—fast or slow. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... garden. It is in this garden he dwells; it is there he walks. See 2 Cor. 6:16. When the south winds blow and the spices flow out he comes into his garden to eat his pleasant fruits; he gathers the myrrh and the spices, he eats honey and drinks wine and milk. See Cant. 4:16 and 5:1. This is sweet language, and is expressive of the purity of the Christian heart, where God dwells, and where he walks in the gentleness of his Spirit, delighting himself in the tender Christian graces that ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... obnoxious. The name of this jargon varies with the country in which it is spoken. In Spain it is called 'Germania'; in France, 'Argot'; in Germany, 'Rothwelsch,' or Red Italian; in Italy, 'Gergo'; whilst in England it is known by many names; for example, 'cant, slang, thieves' Latin,' etc. The most remarkable circumstance connected with the history of this jargon is, that in all the countries in which it is spoken, it has invariably, by the authors who have treated of it, and who are numerous, been confounded with the Gypsy language, and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... with a certain reserve. He was not quite certain if Baltic's conversion was genuine, and if he found proof of hypocrisy, was prepared to fall foul of him forthwith. Sir Harry was not particularly religious, but he was honest, and hated cant with ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... felt it even more than he did. For God made you with a more delicate sense of purity, with a shrinking from the temptation, with a womanly foreboding of disgrace, to help you to hold the cup of your honour steady, which yet you dropped on the ground. Do not seek refuge in the cant about a woman's weakness. The strength of the woman is as needful to her womanhood as the strength of the man is to his manhood; and a woman is just as strong as she will be. And now, instead of humbling yourself before your Father in heaven, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... fancied there might be some error in the translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion, there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any movement of that nature could intelligibly be supposed called for, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... name was brought in, provoking a fretful injunction from Owen not to let him be molested with her cant. Lucilla sighed compliance, though vexed at his egotism, and went to the study, where she found that Mrs. Murrell had brought her grandson, her own most precious comforter, whom she feared she must resign 'to be bred up as a gentleman as he was, and despise his poor old granny; and she would ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contemptuously. "You have the effrontery to stand before my face and offer me this stinking cant ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Linktum come down to free us. Policemen aint in it. You ought ter seen them big black bucks. Their suits was so fine trimmed with them eagle buttons and they wuz gold too. And their shoes shined so they hurt your eyes. I tell yo ah cant comember my age but it's been a ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... attention. I don't think Westminster Abbey helps me personally to attend to the service. On the contrary, I think it makes me think of the building. I used somehow to imagine that service in the open air was necessarily associated with cant. Now I like it far the best. Not merely because it is more sanitary—till some one learns how to ventilate a building decently—but because it absolutely forces you to feel insignificant, and anxious that the ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... principles I loathe, and rather than suffer him to consummate his nuptials, suppose I should (as sure I should) kill myself, it were blasphemy to lay this fatal marriage to heaven's charge——curse on your nonsense, ye imposing gownmen, curse on your holy cant; you may as well call rapes and murders, treason and robbery, the acts of heaven; because heaven suffers them to be committed. Is it heaven's pleasure therefore, heaven's decree? A trick, a wise device of priests, no more——to make the nauseated, tired-out pair drag on the careful business ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange word of an unknown tongue, as the "Mighty Myo," which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness. ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness—even its national cant—with high aspiration, did—it may well be—more than any strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which should thereafter seem ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... with a touch of dry humor. "You are young and adventurous, but you'll find it prudent, so to speak, to accept your environment and submit. Some people call submission duty, but that's really cant; they mean it saves them trouble. Anyhow, you cannot make your own code; when you're born at a place like Tarnside, it's made ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... home to-night for saying it, my heart sat somewhat nearer to those old people who were perhaps a little too dumpish in their repentance and their faith and their hope that morning, than it did to those who took to the table with a light heart. I know all your flippant cant about gospel liberty and against Highland introspection, as you call it—as well as all your habitual neglect of a close and deep self-examination, as Paul called it; but I tell you all to-night ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... knew the ways and means of Meshed, recommended me strongly to become a saka, or water-carrier. 'You are young, and strong,' said he: 'you have a good voice, and would entice people to drink by a harmonious cry. You have besides a great talent for cant and palaver, and for laughing at one's beard. The number of pilgrims who come to Meshed to perform their devotions at the tomb of the Imam is great, and charity being one of the principal instruments which they use for ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... "Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal My words everyone from his neighbour." The older prophets used to begin their utterances with the phrase, "the burden of the Lord;" and Jeremiah complains that this had become an odious cant term in the mouths of his contemporaries; and in the same way Zechariah complains that in his day the great word "comfort," which from the lips of Isaiah had descended like dew from heaven on the parched hearts of the people of God, had become a dry and hackneyed ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... investigations assure us on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Stella. Mama was driving, the horses raned away. We goed very fast as the wind. I almost fall out Mama hanged on to the lines. if she let go we may all be kill. At last she raned them into a fence. they stop and a man ran to help so we are well but mama hands and arms are still so sore she cant write you yet. My brother Calvin is very sweet. God had to give him to us because he squealed so much he sturbed the angels. We are not angels so he Dont sturb us. I thank you for my good little book. and I ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... 1174; and Le Liget has been mentioned, a Charterhouse in Touraine founded in 1178. The most probable explanation is this. Henry tried to do the penance (a) by buying out the Secular Canons of Waltham at a price determined by Archbishop Richard. He replaced these by Canons Regular under Walter de Cant. He then endowed them handsomely and had papal authority for this. (b) He found this so expensive that he tried to do the other two more cheaply. A scandal had arisen in Amesbury. He expelled the incontinent nuns, and brought over from Font Evroult a colony of more devout ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... regrettingly of lost 'systems,' or pigments enjoyed by the medivalists and unattainable now, it would be far better were they to make the best use of existing materials, and study their further development. There is no need for this cant cry of fugacity, which casts such a blight on modern art. Durable pigments are not yet obsolete, they have only to be employed and employed properly to furnish paintings equal in permanence to those of the old ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... My cook... a good-natured negro and a tolerable cook, so unused to a vessel that in the smoothest weather he cannot walk fore and aft without holding onto something with both hands. This fear proceeds from the fact that he is so tall and slim that if he should get a cant it might be fatal to him. I did not think America could furnish such a specimen of the negro race... nor did I ever see such a simpleton. It is impossible to teach him anything and... he can hardly tell ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... what he considered my readiness, although I merely used the cant term for "money," to which I was most accustomed, from my education among the schoolmasters of ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... unfairly. To conceal part. A cant phrase used by thieves, where one of the party conceals some of the booty, instead of dividing ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... son, Thomas COTTERILL, third wrangler, 1832; fellow of St. John's Coll., Cambridge; one of the earliest members of the London Mathematical Soc., to which he contributed many papers of importance.—["Grad. Cant."] ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... this kingdom. He desired the ostler to take his horse in tow, and bring him to his moorings in a safe riding. He ordered the waiter, who showed them into a parlour, to bear a hand, ship his oars, mind his helm, and bring alongside a short allowance of brandy or grog, that he might cant a slug into his bread-room, for there was such a heaving and pitching, that he believed he should shift his ballast. The fellow understood no part of this address but the word brandy, at mention of which he disappeared. Then Crowe, throwing ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... but a lying cant that would represent the merchant and the banker as people disinterestedly toiling for mankind, and then most useful when absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important than ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a shilling, often producing L5. The shepherds on the Wiltshire downs are also well paid, especially in lambing-time, when the greatest watchfulness and care are required. It has been stated that the labourer has no chance of rising from his position. This is sheer cant. He has very good opportunities of rising, and often does rise, to my knowledge. At this present moment I could mention a person who has risen from a position scarcely equal to that of a labourer, not only to have a farm himself, but to place his sons in farms. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... and paced the floor a minute. "Let me tell you folks something. I laugh at the cant they've wrapped the church up in. But I don't laugh at the system of ethics Christ taught. I'm here to tell you folks, He put out the finest, most workable system of ethics the world has ever known. And folks can't live together without ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... me—fascinates me—and yet I wish I could join heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to "clear one's mind of cant" upon the subject, for when you have been accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one's eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one's ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... press-magnet, causing its armature to be attracted, thus lifting the platen and its projecting arm. As the arm lifts upward, the pin moves along the under side of the lower arm of the rocking-lever, thus causing it to cant and shift the type-wheels to the right or left, as desired. The principles of operation of this apparatus have been confined to a very brief and general description, but it is believed to be sufficient for ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... sundowners come, And cunningly ask if the master's at home, 'Be off,' she replies, 'with your blarney and cant, Or I'll call my son Andy; ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... him a saint. To those whose habit it is to judge of a man rather by his actions than by his words, Crawford will appear to have been a selfish, cruel politician, who was not at all the dupe of his own cant, and whose zeal against episcopal government was not a little whetted by his desire to obtain a grant of episcopal domains. In excuse for his greediness, it ought to be said that he was the poorest noble of a poor nobility, and that before the Revolution ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... did he should seek to be rid of one who would save him from shame. God knows what I bore that night when he swore and bade me make tracks from his claim. I started to tell of the horrors of hell, when sudden his eyes lit like coals; And "Chuck it," says he, "don't persecute me with your cant and your saving of souls." I'll swear I was mild as I'd be with a child, but he called me the son of a slut; And, grabbing his gun with a leap and a run, he threatened my face with the butt. So what ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... the women, and ill-treating unarmed men, to make them give up their money. Whosoever does these things, God's curse is on him, and his sin will surely find him out. No excuse of being in hot blood will avail him. No excuse of having fought well beforehand will avail him. Such cant will no more excuse him with God than it will with truly noble-minded men. He may have been brave enough before, but he is doing a coward's deed then; he is doing the devil's work, and the devil, and not God, will pay him his wages, to ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... enormity of the cant about Penny Dreadfuls can best be perceived by travelling to and fro for a week between London and Paris and observing the books read by those who travel with first-class tickets. I think a fond belief in Ivanhoe-within-the-reach-of-all would ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nationalities, and their descendants, but the English and Irish elements predominated. They had an argot peculiar to themselves. It was partly made up of the "flash" language of the London thieves, amplified and enriched by the cant vocabulary and the jargon of crime of every European tongue. They spoke it with a peculiar accent and intonation that made them instantly recognizable from the roughs of all other Cities. They called themselves "N'Yaarkers;" we came ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... almanack was evidently the best of the time, and free from all the astrological cant with which Patridge's Merlinus Liberatus was filled; against which Poor Robin did not a little declaim. The motto ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... corner. Now as you love your poor wife and children come home, and let politiks alone, and provide for your children like a good christian and an honest man, which I have heard it said a politishon cant be. And this is the prayer of your true and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... take her first step on the downward path. Soon daily contact with vice removes abhorrence to it. Familiarity makes it habitual, and another life is ruined. The heartless moral code of the cynical young pleasure-seeking male is summed up in the cant phrase anent women: "Find, ... and forget!" It is these girls, who are victimized by their lack of self-restraint or moral principle, their ignorance or weakness, who make possible the ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... . the devil take such cant! Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol, I am his cut-throat, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... existence—and has nothing to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill—there is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection—except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts. That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle's books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... wish to say something on the "condition-of-women" question, but it is one on which so much cant has been talked, that one feels a sort of reluctance to approach it. I have always been accustomed to think that the necessity of earning one's living is not, in itself, an evil; though I feel it may become a heavy evil if ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... authority, and though I am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he imagines, yet his scruples in this case are to be commended in him as laudable and religious." The Queen understood the meaning of this cant, recovered herself all of a sudden, and spoke to me very civilly; to which I answered with profound respect and so innocent a countenance that La Riviere said, whispering to Beautru, "See what it is not to be always at Court! The Coadjutor knows the world and is a man of sense, yet takes all the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on harmonizing things which do not, and never can harmonize? It is because they are aware that the Bible has authority with the people; otherwise they would never trouble themselves about so troublesome a book.' I cannot suspect you of such hypocrisy; but I must confess I regard your language as cant. As I listen to you I seem to see a hybrid between Prynne and Voltaire. So far from its being true that you have renounced the 'letter' of the Bible and retained its 'spirit,' I think it would be much more correct to say, comparing your infidel hypothesis with your most spiritual ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... for your Speech, I pray you will not pause upon it, but keep the bill to its passage through both Houses of Congress. I know you would if you could see the destitution of instruction, and the poverty which cant pay for it, on the Consecrated peninsula of Jas Town, York Town, and Williamsburg. Ah! tear down every parapet of War— cruel War, wanton war call it if you will—but for the Past, for Piety's sake, for Learning and Moral's sake let Old Wm & Mary stand a Beacon Light for ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... were in the act of hoisting the sixth and last log, and just about to cant it into its place, the iron hook of the principal purchase-block gave way, and the great beam, measuring fifty feet in length, fell upon the rock with a terrible crash; but although there were fifty-two men around the beacon at the time, not ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... get Ellen Middleton, it is well worth your reading. Lady Georgiana certainly inherits her grandmother's genius, and there is a high-toned morality and religious principle through the book (where got she "that heroic measure"?) without any cant or ostentation: it is the same moral I intended in Helen, but exemplified in much deeper and stronger colours. This is—but you must read ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... quality of his moral personality. However much we may be repelled by the thinker, we are attracted by the magnetism of the man, by his noble courage, by his splendid integrity, by his love of truth, his hatred of cant. Even though he has himself misunderstood Christianity, he has done a great deal to bring us back to the fundamental ideals of the Christian religion. He has done a great deal to undermine that superficial and "rose-water" view of Christianity current ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... I might find that the bright wit that I fancy I flash around makes you feel tired. Jones's eyeglass would drop out of his eye because he would know it only made him look foolish, Brown would see the ugliness of his cant, and Robinson would sorry that he had been born a bully and as prickly as a hedgehog. It would do us all good to get this ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... of a man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way, they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... romantic element in Greek life and art; yet it is a mistake to call him a Greek. An Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he thought, the noblest specimen of humanity that history had to show, and of that nobility he assimilated what he could. He acquired a distaste for cant, prudery, facile emotion, and philanthropy; he learnt to enjoy the good things of life without fear or shame; to love strength and beauty, and to respect the truth. For all that, he was a modern too; sharp eyes can see it in his verse. A touch of gloating and uninquisitive wonder, a suspicion of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... quickened her vexation. A gentleman! The cant word, the fetish of this ring of idle aristocrats—she knew the hollowness of the whole farce. The democrat in her made her walk off with erect head and bright eyes, leaving a penitent boy behind; while all the time a sick, longing heart drove ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... of that doctrine will do away with all cant and all pretence. It will do away with all religious bigotry and persecution. It will allow every man to think and to express his thought. It will do away with bigotry in all its slimy and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... as it is with the genuine Gipsies. He has taken to it from choice, and the true-bred Romany will always regard him with contempt, as a mere migratory gaol bird, who knows no tongue of the roads beyond the cant or 'kennick' of thieves—a Whitechapel argot, familiarity with which at once tells its own tale. Fortunately, our existing law is sufficient to keep the nuisance in check, if only it be resolutely administered. The ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... from your slumbers, Arise! ye criminals of want, For reason in revolt now thunders, And at last ends the age of cant." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... questions shall be answered in their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice, and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them; and I pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just now by the bye; my present subject is my Accuser; what I insist upon here is this unmanly attempt ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... "admiration" for the "excellent British Constitution," desiring only to live and die as free citizens under the protecting wing of the mother country. Recalling all this sickening sentimentalism, Mr. Paine uttered a loud and ringing BOSH! Let us clear our minds of cant, he said in effect, and ask ourselves what is the nature of government in general and of the famous British Constitution in particular. Like the Abbe Sieyes, Mr. Paine had completely mastered the science of government, which was in fact ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... ever, if we wait until life is safe. We may be separated.... We may lose one another altogether.... Let us fight against it. Why should we separate? Unless True Love is like the other things—an empty cant. This is the only way. We two—who ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... very few works printed in days of yore which have running titles to the subjects discussed in them. These may be recommendations with the bibliomaniac; but he should be informed that this volume contains a great deal of puritanical cant, and licentious language; that vices are magnified in it in order to be lashed, and virtues diminished that they might not be noticed. Stubbes equals Prynne in his anathemas against "Plays and Interludes:" and in his chapters upon ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... her bows toward us, so as to torpedo us the moment we should arrive within range, or was she trusting that her presence was undetected, and waiting patiently for the moment when we should cross her bows as she lay? The latter, I believed, for she could not cant toward us without going either ahead or astern, and she could not do either without her periscope raising a ripple; and I was certain that nothing of that sort had happened. I determined to risk something, after all, to put that submarine out of action, and so held steadily on. At length we arrived ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... $1,272,247. Bangor has various manufactures, the most important of which (other than those dependent upon lumber) are boots and shoes (including moccasins); among others are trunks, valises, saws, stoves, ranges and furnaces, edge tools and cant dogs, saw-mill machinery, brick, clothing, cigars, flour and dairy products. In 1905 the city's factory products were valued at $3,408,355. The municipality owns and operates the water-works (the water-supply being drawn from the Penobscot by the Holly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... like to play with dowls and rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of guns. They stay at home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They are al-ways sick. They are always funy and making fun of boy's hands and they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things. They make fun of boys and then turn round and love them. I dont beleave they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh ant the moon lovely. Thir is one thing I have not told ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I stand here that there is something especially—I might almost use a cant word and say monumentally—interesting in a meeting like this. It is the first time that English and American authors, so far as I know, have come together in any numbers, I was going to say to fraternize, when I remembered that I ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... worth, from his neighbour's pocket into his. The object of puzzling the question with religion is clear. You cannot quarrel for sixpences with the man who is helping you the way to heaven. The man who wants your sixpences, therefore, assumes a religious phraseology, which is cant, and cant is fraud, and fraud is dishonesty, and the dishonest should have a mark set ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... his naturalism was only skin deep. He, too, was swayed by his literary notions concerning the importance of the subject. In painting the theme may count for little and yet a great picture result; in Zola's field there must be an appreciable subject, else no fiction. But what cant it is to talk about "dignity." Zola admits ingrained romanticism. He would not see, for instance, that the Degas ballet girls are on the same plane as the Ingres odalisques; that a still-life by Chardin outweighs a big canvas by David; and it must be admitted that the world ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... maiden helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene, showing how the Laplanders break every 'law,' human and 'divine', ventilation, bath, and diet—all the trash—and therefore enjoy the most excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded in describing the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... was a great blackguard, but as he has long joined the majority, it is of no consequence. There was one thing I admired about Sam: there was a thorough absence in him of all hypocrisy and cant. He professed no religion whatever, but acted upon the principle that a bargain was a bargain, and should be carried out as between man and man. That was his idea, and as I found him true to it, I respected him accordingly, and mention his name ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton |
