"Cocksure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... side gave me a cocksure smile and the short guy said, "We're about to leave St. Louis on U.S. 40, Cornell. I hope you won't find ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... is exactly the opposite type. She makes decisions with great promptness, never hesitates, is "cocksure" and aggressive. If M. is ambivalent, his sister B. M. is univalent. Choice is an easy matter to her, though she is not impulsive. She rapidly deliberates. She never has made any serious errors in judgment, but if she makes a mistake she shrugs her shoulders ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the first snare set for me tripped up my heels," said Saxham. "I paid the penalty of being cocksure. And I had not the common decency to die then and release you. True, there were reasons—they are swept away now!... I sent you to Wales that I might be free of the sight of you, that I might end the sordid comedy and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... got to me that Blome gloried in this situation. I've seen a man dead-set to kill another, all dark, sullen, restless. But Blome wasn't that way. He didn't seem at all like a bloody devil. He was vain, cocksure. He was revelin' in the effect he made. I had ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... Path leads to, my pippin, I'm cocksure can't 'ave a wus smell. Like bad eggs, salt, and tenpenny nails biled in bilge water. Eugh! Old Pump Well? Wy then let well alone, is my motter, or leastways, it would be, I'm sure, But for BLACK—local doctor, a stunner!—who's got me in 'and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... singular that this McCarthy, who appears to have had little of his own, and to have been under such obligations to Turner, should still talk of marrying his son to Turner's daughter, who is, presumably, heiress to the estate, and that in such a very cocksure manner, as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would follow? It is the more strange, since we know that Turner himself was averse to the idea. The daughter told us as much. Do you not deduce ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was decidedly awkward. Yes, she was changing, growing fast. And Roger did not like it. Here she was spending money like water, absorbed in her pleasures, having no baby, apparently at loose ends with her husband, and through it all so cocksure of herself and her outrageous views about war, and smiling about them with such an air, and in her whole manner, such a tone of amused superiority. She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... we have our cocksure little guides, some of whom say to us, "That is primitive, therefore it is good," and others, "This is up-to-date, therefore it is better." Not very wise persons any of them, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... blusterous, bumptious Behemoth, BILL STEAD? Knew all about building Snow Men, he did; had a private monopoly of omniscience in that, as in most other things, BILL had. And now he's licking creation into shape for six-pence a month, and shying stones at us whenever he sees a chance. Little cocksure LABBY, too! Oh, he's a nice boy! If BILL takes all Knowledge for his province, HENRY considers himself sole proprietor of Truth, and he lets us have Truth—his Truth—every week at least—in hard chunks—that hurt horribly. All in pure friendliness, too, as the Bobby said ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... 'hopelessly,'" replied Thorndyke, as we took our places in the carriage, "though I expect the police are pretty cocksure. ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... with anxiety. She, and all who knew him well, had seen Stonor crush the cocksure and the unwary with an awful effectualness. But Farnborough, with the courage of enthusiasm—enthusiasm for himself and his own future—went ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... hungry, restless folk who, by scores nay, even by hundreds—could be seen crowded around the gaming-tables. For in a desire to win quickly and to win much I can see nothing sordid; I have always applauded the opinion of a certain dead and gone, but cocksure, moralist who replied to the excuse that "one may always gamble moderately", by saying that to do so makes things worse, since, in that case, the profits too ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... fault of ignorance. I had often erred in the same way in other experiences of life, but I had not taken the lesson to heart. I remember at school our "head" taking us—I was in the lower fifth then—in Latin verse. He rebuked me for a false quantity, and I, very cocksure, disputed the point and read my line. The head pointed out very gravely that I had been misled by an English analogy in my pronunciation of the word "maritus," and I grew very hot and ashamed and apologetic. I feel much the same now when I think of my early ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... cocksure of that," retorted Captain Miles. "Sharks, I have noticed, frequently resemble cats in the way they will nibble at a bait, and pretend they don't care about it, when all the while they are dying to gobble it down—just in ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... thing—that impulse is part of me, is it not? Ah! My brain reels at these mysteries! Lord! what flimsy fluctuating things we are—first this, then that, a thought, an impulse, a deed and a forgetting, and all the time madly cocksure we are ourselves. And as for you—you who have hardly learned to think for more than five or six short years, there you sit, assured, coherent, there you sit in all your inherited original sin—Hallucinatory Windlestraw!—judging and condemning. You know Right from Wrong! My boy, so did ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... watched him walk away. He followed the Englishman with his eyes, a frown crossing his face. There was something too cocksure about the man. His ridicule of American scientists could be ignored, but the way he spoke about his theory, as if it had already been a proven fact against ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... any fear of the future of the prisoners,' he said, in a low whisper. 'They are not bound for the Barbadoes, nor will this skinflint of a captain have the selling of them, for all that he is so cocksure. If he can bring his own skin out of the business, it will be more than I expect. He hath a man aboard his ship who would think no more of giving him a tilt over ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... resigned his position, arrogantly declaring that he would not work for a house where results were so little appreciated. He was cocksure of himself. However, when he offered his services to a competing firm, his application was turned down. The rebuff stunned him. He did not realize that his egotism disgusted the second executive as much as the first. The salesman's spirit was broken. He has never since been more ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins |
