"Sententious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quivered among the branches. He roved from walk to walk as chance directed him, and sometimes listened to the songs, sometimes mingled with the dancers, sometimes let loose his imagination in flights of merriment; and sometimes uttered grave reflections, and sententious maxims, and feasted on the admiration with which they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... itself even in connection with a subject remote from his ordinary field, and here as elsewhere he shows himself prone to quote from the drama.[160] But Scott was interested in plays for what he found in them of characters and manners, of witty and sententious speech, of situations and incidents, and only secondarily in the technical aspects of the drama. Reading his novels we could guess that he would care more for the concrete elements of a play than for the orderly march of events through the various stages of a formally proper construction. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... ab omni parte beatum;" "Omnes eodem cogimur,"—these and similar expressions remain in the memory when other features of Horace's style, equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very position of the sentence ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... smiled. He reached into a pocket, and for a moment Maurice expected to see a pistol come forth. But he was needlessly alarmed. Beauvais extracted two envelopes from the pocket and sailed them through the intervening space. They fell on the table. "Put not your trust in hotel clerks," was the sententious observation. "At least, till you have discovered that no one else employs them. I am well served. The clerk was told to intercept your outgoing post; and there is the evidence. Ten thousand crowns and a ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... to stand nigh the muzzle of a big gun when she's going to be fired," growled Ben, in a sententious voice, and the ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... Popenjoy." "We have to regard, in the first place, the honour of the family. No remissness on his part should induce us to forget for a moment what is due to the title, the property, and the name." The letter was very long, and was full of sententious instructions, such as the above. But the purport of it was to tell the ladies at Cross Hall that they must go through the first burden of receiving the Marquis ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... assist his fellow-man," replied Pipelet, in a sententious and melancholy tone: "and more particularly so when his fellow-man is so good a lodger ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... but an entire assemblage holding intercourse in dainty Parisian, exquisite as the famous dialect of the Brahmans. There was the graceful compliment, the antithetic description, the witty repartee. One could say the poetical or sententious without being insulted by a stare. Some of the ladies were beautiful, some were not, but they had for the most part a quite ideal degree of grace and many of them a kind of dignity not too often elsewhere found. Every person laughed and was ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... Hardly-entreated brothers and sisters of humanity! not always shall the glaring inequality that surrounds you, crush your spirits to the earth! . . . THERE is a pleasant pen in our metropolitan 'Aurora,' which occasionally dashes off sententious paragraphs that flash and sparkle like snow-crust in a moon-lit night in winter. There is evidently a FOSTER-ing hand over its columns; and through them (let us add, as it is that of which we especially wish to speak,) over the reputation of Mr. WILLIS. The ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes—the epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of aphorisms, instruction us ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... young prince than that of any of his tutors was exercised by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, his mother's chief friend and adviser. He was a fine showy man, vain of his handsome person, theatrical in his manners, pompous, slow and sententious in his speech. His private life was respectable; he had literary and scientific tastes, and a good deal of superficial knowledge. His abilities were small; he would, George's father used to say, "make an excellent ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... laws, and institutions of the people over whom he presided. Loyal and dutiful addresses, expressing such sentiments, were presented to the young monarch by the city of London, the two universities, and from various bodies of people, to all which he returned sententious but suitable replies, declaring his fixed resolve to respect their rights and conciliate their esteem. A letter was addressed to him by the venerable Bishop of London, Dr. Sherlock, as a parting benediction, in which he gave him the following wise council:—"You, sir," he writes, "are ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... private, but I fancy approximation is not highly in her favour. I found her the heroine of a tragedy,—sublime, elevated, and solemn. In face and person truly noble and commanding; in manners quiet and stiff; in voice deep and dragging; and in conversation, formal, sententious, calm, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... haughty Roman idea, the sententious announcement was thought sufficient for the purpose—and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... to their friends, are all affection; Some are wise and sententious; some strain their powers for efforts of gaiety; some write news, and some write secrets—but to make a letter without affection, without wisdom, without gaiety, without news, and without a secret, is doubtless the great ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... he even ventured to ask the pilot in a low voice. The pilot turned out to be a good-natured specimen of his kind, condescending, sententious. He had been down to his meals in the main cabin, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... naked swords upon the grave of this corpse, which was disinterred three or four times a day, according to the caprice of the first comer, an Albanian, who chanced to be at Mico accidentally, bethought himself of saying in a sententious tone, that it was very ridiculous to make use of the swords of Christians in such a case. Do you not see, blind as ye are, said he, that the hilt of these swords, forming a cross with the handle, prevents the devil from coming ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... councillors is the apothecary, a short, and rather fat man, with a pair of prominent eyes, that diverge like those of a lobster. He is the village wise man; very sententious; and full of profound remarks on shallow subjects. Master Simon often quotes his sayings, and mentions him as rather an extraordinary man; and even consults him occasionally in desperate cases of the dogs and horses. Indeed he seems to have ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... society has a wealth of pleasing indoor pastimes. We remember the sententious Question reunions, the hilarious Surprise parties, Fairy-bowl, and Hunt-the-slipper. We can never forget the vagabond Calathumpians, who employ in their bands everything inharmonious, from a fire-shovel to a stewpan, causing more din than the demons down ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious] I know not well what degree of respect Shakespeare intends to obtain for this vicar, but he has here put into his mouth a finished representation of colloquial excellence. It is very difficult to add any thing to this character of the school-master's table-talk, and perhaps all ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the sententious language of the Bible, "It is not good for man to be alone." All our faculties and attributes bear relation to, and talk to us of, other beings like ourselves. We might indeed eat, drink and sleep, that is, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... will not have it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song at last ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which we commemorate is all-important, not merely in our own annals, but in those of the world. The sententious English poet has declared that "the proper study of mankind is man," and of all inquiries of a temporal nature, the history of our fellow-beings is unquestionably among the most interesting. But not all the chapters of human history are alike important. The annals of our race have been filled ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... on the stripling! how he apes his sire! Ambitiously sententious—But I wonder Old Syphax comes not; his Numidian genius Is well disposed to mischief, were he prompt And eager on it; but he must be spurr'd, And every moment quicken'd to the course. Cato has used me ill; he has refused His daughter Marcia to my ardent ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... is a private members' night the Whips have no responsibility in the matter of keeping a House, and have even been suspected of occasionally conniving in the beneficent plot of dispersing it. But just now private members' nights stand in the same relation to the Session as the sententious traveller found to be the case with snakes in Iceland. There are none. Every night is a Government night, and weariness of flesh and spirit naturally suggests a count-out. The regular business of the Whip is to see that there are within call ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hero, and Fanny is a sufficiently fresh and blooming heroine. The characters of Pamela and Mr. Booby are fairly preserved from the pages of their original inventor. But when Fielding makes Parson Adams rebuke the pair for laughing in church at Joseph's wedding, and puts into the lady's mouth a sententious little speech upon her altered position in life, he is adding some ironical touches which Richardson ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... shadowy and elevated performance called the Mort d' Arthur—will probably be always thought the best. Tennyson, when he wrote it, was just trying the peculiarities of his style: he was testing the quality of his cadences, the ring of his long sententious lines repeated continually as refrains, and the trustworthiness of his artful, much-sacrificing simplicity. He put as it were a spot or two of pigment on the end of his painting-knife, and held it up into the air of the vaporous traditions of the Round Table. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... by brandy-and-water and pipes: and these came out in such rapid succession, that when Grotait drove Little and two others home, his utterance was thick, and his speech sententious. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... college-pedant, who is imagined to have given in to every species of false wit, and never to have reached beyond quibbles, puns, conceits, and quolibets,—was in truth a great wit; quick in retort, and happy in illustration; and often delivering opinions with a sententious force. More wit and wisdom from his lips have descended to us than from any other of our sovereigns. One of the malicious writers of his secret history, Sir Anthony Weldon, not only informs us that he was witty, but describes ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... bringing us to about 1840. Then there swung a school of what we call the palmy days of old comedy, and in the '40's it dwindled to nothing, and England and America waited until the early '60's. Then came Tom Robertson with his so-called "tea-cup and saucer" school, which consisted of sententious dialogue, simple situations, conventional characterizations, and threads of plots, until Pinero and Jones put a stop to the ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... of his many plantations, and his "master" carpenters, millers, and gardeners, were quite as great trials as his slaves. First "young Stephens" gave him much trouble, which his diary reports in a number of sententious entries: "visited my Plantation. Severely reprimanded young Stephens for his Indolence, and his father for suffering it;" "forbid Stephens keeping any horses upon my expence;" "visited my quarters & ye Mill, according to custom found young Stephens absent;" "visited my Plantation and found ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... gentleman, with a cheek like a winter apple, and his grey hair partly concealed by a small, high hat, shaped like a cone, or rather like such a strawberry-basket as London fruiterers exhibit at their windows. He was too sententious a person to waste words on mere salutation; so, having welcomed Tressilian with a nod and a shake of the hand, he beckoned him to follow to Sir Hugh's great chamber, which the good knight usually inhabited. Will Badger followed, unasked, anxious to see whether ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... keeping the poor man from his dinner. My bowels yearned with sympathy, and putting in his hand a small token of my gratitude and goodness, I departed with a hearty benediction on him, Dame Honeyball, and the parish club of Crooked Lane—not forgetting my shabby, but sententious friend, in the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the matter of that volcanic eruption, had previously gotten the praise for what was not his merit, so now this sinner was blamed for what was not his fault. Had the sub-committee waited till the crack of doom, it would have made no difference whatever to the general trend of Mr. Keith's sententious irrelevancies. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... weight and cadence of the Woodman's; a change of label would enable the lion to change places with the spaniel, would suffice to cage the wolf as a bird and set free the parrot as a beast of prey. All are equally pert, brisk, and dapper in expression; all are equally sententious and smart in aim; all are absolutely identical in function and effect. The whole gathering is stuffed with the same straw, prepared with the same dressing, ticketed in the same handwriting, and painted with the same colours. Any one who remembers the infinite variety of La Fontaine will ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... to the wildness of the suffering patient. Mr. Hastings on his part seemed anxious and angry, both in one. He said to Dora savagely that he hoped it would teach the reckless fellow a lesson that he would never forget, and resented with haughty silence Dr. Arnold's sententious reply, that "it was likely to do just that." Then he openly and unhesitatingly regretted Dr. Armitage's absence, sent twice to his home to learn concerning his whereabouts, and was not improved in temper ...
— Three People • Pansy
... genius. She does not gossip delightfully; at times she may seem a little hard or dry; but her reason is really guided by human kindness. "Her style," wrote a high authority, Dollinger, "is clear, terse, refined, often sententious; her business letters are patterns of simplicity and pregnant brevity. They might be characterised as womanly yet manly, so well do they combine the warmth and depth of womanly feeling with the strength and lucidity of a masculine mind." The foundation of Saint-Cyr, for the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... sprightly youths, quite flush with hope and spirit, Who think to storm the world by dint of merit, To you the dotard has a deal to say, In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way! He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle, That the first blow is ever half the battle; That tho' some by the skirt may try to snatch him, Yet by the foreclock is the hold to catch him; That whether doing, suffering, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... not know what they like," said Aunt Louise. Aunt Louise was apt to be sententious. She ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... make one good enough if it were properly obeyed; certainly that of Confucius would do so. I have been deeply impressed with his greatness and purity. Dr. Davis writes in his work on China: "Confucius embodied in sententious maxims the first principles of morals and of government, and the purity and excellence of some of his precepts will bear comparison with even those of the Gospel." In Thornton's History of China I find this noteworthy ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... subscribers scattered over Turkey. Mr. E. E. Bliss, the editor, estimated the aggregate of readers at ten thousand. One incident may illustrate its influence. A villager living on the Taurus Mountains was so impressed with one of the sententious speeches of President Lincoln, translated in the paper, that he committed the whole to memory, that he might teach to others its lessons of "malice toward ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... who was in the Crimea, and who takes a somewhat larger view of things than the sententious Trochu, has been good enough to furnish me with a pass, which allows me to wander unmolested anywhere within the French outposts. "If you attempt to pass them," observes the General, "you will be shot by the sentinels, in obedience to my orders." A ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... Many of its passages can be paralleled only by the majestic periods of Milton's prose, or perhaps by the vehement and impassioned eloquence of Demosthenes. Its tone is one of sustained elevation, and in sententious moral and political wisdom it will bear a comparison with the greatest productions of Burke. We trust that this pamphlet will be republished. A collection and separate publication of all Mr. Wordsworth's prose writings would form a valuable addition ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... drama in which Julien found himself involved was embodied in the answer to the question. It was not easy to formulate. The Italians have a proverb of singular depth which the novelist recalled at that moment. He had laughed a great deal when he heard sententious Egiste Brancadori repeat it. He repeated it to himself, and he understood its meaning. 'Chi non sa fingersi amico, non sa essere nemico. "He who does not know how to disguise himself as a friend, ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... seems to penetrate and enfold me. To the hunted animal a sense of safety is perhaps a greater pleasure than any other, and one is never really unhappy, however uncomfortable one's circumstances may be, if one is doing what one wants to do.... But I am becoming sententious." ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... persistent, while the judge's last sententious remark regarding the recent subdivision of the estate awakened a new ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Gallery. The Times staff appropriated the room to the right, still occupied by their telephonic service; the corresponding room to the left being for general use. The room at the top of the stairs—where Wright still presides and entrances the telegraph messengers with sententious remarks on political, social, and philosophic affairs—was also used for writing-out purposes, if a man could find a corner at the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... "real Bonivard" might have indulged in and, perhaps, prided himself on this feeble and irritating paronomasy; but nothing can be less in keeping with the bearing and behaviour of the tragic and sententious Bonivard of the legend.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... glad to have proved the strength of my brother," was the sententious reply. "Where goes my brother through the woods, which are full of danger to him to-night? Or ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... conversant, as appears from his satires against the Jesuits, in which there is discovered as much learning as wit. In the second volume of the great historical, geographical, and poetical Dictionary, he is stiled the Darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth writer: "His translations exceed the original, and his invention seems matchless. His satire against the Jesuits is of special note; he may be justly said to have excelled all the satirists of the age." ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... before it, and made what was perhaps the most carefully prepared speech of his whole life. Every word of it was written, every sentence had been tested; but the speaker delivered it without manuscript or notes. It was not an ordinary oration, but, in the main, an argument, as sententious and axiomatic as if made to a bench of jurists. Its opening sentences contained a political prophecy which not only became the ground-work of the campaign, but heralded one of the world's great historical ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long, flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... he'll ever have," was his sententious remark. No other word was uttered until they were inside the house, Mrs. Braddock's gasp of relief could not have been called ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... luck to move a cat," said Nora, in her sententious fashion; "but we don't believe in it. We've moved him twice already. And you just put a little ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... recent play, The Virgin Widow (1850), Mr Taylor declines from the promise of his earlier efforts. The preface suggests great things; but they are not forthcoming. There is much careful finish, much sententious rhetoric, much elegant description; but there is little of racy humour (the play is a 'romantic comedy'), little of poetical freshness, little of lively flesh and blood portraiture, and more of melodramatic expedience ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... hitherto justice has been administered, and intimate union effected, domestic tranquillity preserved, and personal liberty secured to the citizen. As was to be expected, however, from the defect of language and the necessarily sententious manner in which the Constitution is written, disputes have arisen as to the amount of power which it has actually granted or was intended ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... pain no one by quoting Janet's common sense. For that I should be sorry. I remember her words because so often, when sinking in sloughs of childish despond, they afforded me firm foothold. More often than I can tell, when compelled to listen to the sententious voice of immeasurable Folly glibly explaining the eternal mysteries, has it comforted me to whisper to myself: "I don't believe it of Him. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Adolph seems to have acted as the great consoler. He, at any rate, knew better than to think a boy was on the way to the bottomless pit simply because he could not get on with a gang of dull pedagogues. Now and later he lectured Richard in a kindly if sententious way; and he must have fostered the boy's natural strong spirit of revolt. Adolph loathed authority, especially the authority of irresponsible court officials; and in some of his preserved letters he lashes these gentry, the scum ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... times flooded the stage with its rays or left it in darkness. Every detail was excellently and exactly reproduced. The scene was shifted, and Hamlet began his allusions, his sallies of sarcasm, his sententious sayings, his points of satire with the courtiers, who sought to study and to penetrate the sentiments of the young prince. In this scene Irving was simply sublime. His mobile face mirrored his thoughts. The subtle penetration of his phrases, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... joined, the force of the principle of sound money and started a remarkable campaign of education by issuing speeches and articles by the millions in a number of different languages, in providing excellent arguments for the country press, and in convincing those who would listen only to arguments of sententious brevity by a well-devised circulation of "nuggets" of financial wisdom. McKinley had also the support of the greater part of the Independent and Democratic press. While financial magnates and the bankers of the country were alarmed ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... warning to Reardon that his half-year of insufficient food and general waste of strength would make the coming winter a hard time for him, worse probably than the last. Biffen, responding in person to the summons, found him in bed, waited upon by a gaunt, dry, sententious woman of sixty—not the landlady, but a lodger who was glad to earn one meal a day by any ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... I had finished, then remarked with sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... is still, is always, young and romantic," said John, sententious. "I can't admit that an age of prose and prudence is possible. The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly. The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... be brief in explaining my real opinion,) to speak in a well-arranged and suitable manner without good ideas is to act like a madman. But to speak in a sententious manner, without any order or method in one's language, is to behave like a child: but still it is childishness of that sort, that those who employ it cannot be considered stupid men, and indeed may often be accounted wise ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... to me the most wonderful specimen of sententious fluency I had ever witnessed. The words poured from his lips in a torrent, but the sentences were correctly formed, the matter grave and important, the train of thought distinctly pursued, the illustrations wonderfully happy, drawn ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a stout, well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave his jaded horse a tap with the sjambock ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... This sententious answer struck them with astonishment, as I expected it would, and they looked at ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Dr. Johnson "that nothing can supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will render knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible." This sententious apothegm is thrown out in contemplating the life of Savage, one of the English poets who united some of the highest requisites of genius with the lowest personal habits. But how much instruction does it convey to all! It does not fall to the lot of all to have wit or genius, or to be eminent ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... artist's knowledge of life and power of satirical delineation. On the other hand, there breaks forth everywhere, and in many scenes entirely predominates, a grave moral thoughtfulness, expressed in a solemn, reflective, and sometimes in a sententious brevity of phrase and harshness of rhythm, which seem to me to stamp many passages as belonging to the epoch of Measure for Measure, or of King Lear. We miss, too, the gay and fanciful imagery which shows itself ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... was well enough, but it did not make him happy. The more patient his auditor was, the deeper he sank in his melancholy. A few times the sovereign light-heartedness of the good-for-nothing Finkenbein infected him for half an hour to the extent of reviving the grand gestures and sententious utterances of his golden days—but his hands had grown stiff, and the words no longer came from his heart. In the last sunshiny days of autumn he sometimes sat under the decaying apple-trees; but he never looked on town and valley now with envy or desire. His glance was ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... with foggy allusions to the mysterious past. I may mention that his own conduct in the interval had been such as I can only regard as a lamentable relapse from the altitude of the earlier chapters. But it is all vastly serious—it would perhaps be unkind to say sententious—and wholly unruffled by the faintest suggestion of comedy. For which reason I should never be startled to learn that HARRY TIGHE was either youthful, Scotch, or female (or indeed, for that matter, all three). In any case I can only hope that he, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... placed him at the head of the bar. His opponents ranked him second only to their particular favourite. As a speaker, Colonel Burr was calm and persuasive. He was most remarkable for the power which he possessed of condensation. His appeals, whether to a court or a jury, were sententious and lucid. His speeches, generally, were argumentative, short, and pithy. No flights of fancy, no metaphors, no parade of impassioned sentences, are to be found in them. When employed on the same side of a cause with ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... him I canna interfere, and if she doesna there is no need to interfere," replied Mrs. MacDavitt, with sententious wisdom. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and the author seems to expect his readers to be prepared with more knowledge ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... naturally very anxious to prevent the passage of an international copy-right law. As might be anticipated of such an advocate, his real reasons are all based upon the argumentum ad crumenam, the argument to the purse. Mr. ADAMSON, in a few satirical, well-reasoned, sententious paragraphs, has fairly demolished the superstructure which Selfishness had reared, and exposed the misrepresentations upon which alone the unsubstantial fabric could have rested. It is quiet and good-natured, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... series of vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax—a mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a somewhat sententious voice, has "points of the compass, like any other place. It has its north and its south, its east and its west. The west, I have been told, is the aristocratic and expensive quarter, so of course we won't go there. In the east, the miserably poor and dirty people live—we ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... captured her in the Bay of Biscay, and discovered there were forty Inquisition prisoners aboard. After rescuing the prisoners, the captain and crew of the Spanish vessel were then sewn up in their own mainsail and tossed into the sea, no doubt with such sententious expressions of godliness as was thought befitting to sacred occasions of that period. This ceremony having been performed, the vessel was scuttled, so that she might nevermore be used in trading with British sailors or any one else for Inquisition purposes. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... crestfallen brother was obliged to retrace his steps. As he retreated by the pew, far down the aisle, where the clerical wag was sitting, that pleasant man leaned over the door, and greeted his comrade with the sententious whisper, "May it be sanctified to you, dear brother!" Every right-minded man will wish the same blessing to the rebuke of the loud-talking maids and youths in theatres and concert-halls, whose conversation, however lively, is not the ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... obtain cheap celebrity. I always read these productions; they are pages of human life. The majority of the scribblers leave a name and nothing more: beyond that, some few of their productions are witty, some sententious, mostly gross. My thoughts, as I read over the rubbish, were happily expressed by the following ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the book of Proverbs. Its short, sententious sentences were altogether to his mind. "There is that scattereth," he read, "and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." "I scatter," he said; "but I don't want to increase. Lord, spare me the consequences of ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... the grace of Plato; he illuminates his works with no myths or allegories; his manner is dry, sententious, familiar, without the slightest attempt at ornament. There are occasional touches of caustic humour, but nothing of emotion, still less of rhapsody. His strength lies in the vast architectonic genius by which he correlates every domain of the knowable in a single scheme, and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... "Business before pleasure," said a sententious member. "What's a programme to a matter concerning the ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... sprightly youths, quite flushed with hope and spirit, Who think to storm the world by dint of merit, To you the dotard has a deal to say, In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way; He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle, That the first blow is ever half the battle: That tho' some by the skirt may try to snatch him, Yet by the forelock is the hold to catch him; That whether ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a Spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... trifle sententious, and Rowland turned to the bust of Miss Light. Like every one else in Rome, by this time, Miss Blanchard had an opinion on the young girl's beauty, and, in her own fashion, she expressed it epigrammatically. "She looks ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... quoted on the catalogue) "a piece of history," but a piece of biography into the bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally amusing, and carried its own credentials equally upon its face. These portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a volume of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from Raeburn's palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are both signed and countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the artist, whom you recognise ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was methodical and analytical; he divided what he wrote into chapters and sections. He had extracted from the works of Nicole and Fenelon, his favourite authors, three or four hundred concise and sententious phrases; these he had classed according to subject, and formed a work of them in the style of Montesquieu. To this treatise he had given the following general title: "Of Moderate Monarchy" (De la Monarchie temperee), with chapters entitled, "Of the Person ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... cousin of John Adams and the predecessor of Flint, had lived among his people as a chieftain. He was not only the spiritual teacher, he was supreme in most other matters. Unlike the Adams family generally, he had a rough wit and a sententious practical wisdom about common things not unlike the kindred conspicuous qualities in Dr. Franklin. If the traditions that existed in my boyhood were trustworthy, he said and did things that would have ruined an ordinary minister. Adams gave an earnest support to the Revolution, and one of his ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... as well as classical erudition Ascham preferred Sophocles and Euripides to the oratorical and sententious Seneca, his view was not shared by the renaissance. Scaliger, preoccupied as he was with style, found his ideal of tragedy not in the plays of the great Greeks, but in the closet dramas of the declamatory Spaniard. Seneca appealed to the renaissance not only on account of his ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... slothful, sensual, and selfish temper; to the consciousness of being unequal to any great and generous attempts; to the disappointment of schemes of ambition or of glory; to a little personal experience of the world's capricious and inconstant humour. The renunciation in these cases, however sententious, is often far from sincere; and it is even made not unfrequently, with a view to the attainment of that very distinction which it affects to disclaim. In some other of these instances, the over-valuation and inordinate ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Conolly, "the most enlightened men often express themselves in a purely conventional manner on subjects on which they have the deepest convictions." This sententious utterance had the effect of extinguishing the conversation for some moments, Marian being unable to think of a worthy rejoinder. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... courteous, handsome, and accomplished. Only among the women were there still a few who resented their colonel's capture; and some of these, oblivious of the fact that they had tempted him with relations of their own, were sententious and severe in their condemnation of second marriage; for the colonel, too, was indulging in a second experiment. Of his first, only one man in the regiment, besides the commander, could tell anything; and he, to the just indignation of almost everybody, would not discuss the ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... are witty. Dry wit, with a proverbial philosophy in it which would have delighted the soul of Tupper, is indigenous to the Indian. The Indian is the finest epigrammist on earth. His sentences are pithy and sententious, because short—never long and involved. A book of Indian wit and wisdom would have an enormous sale, and reveal the very core of his thought ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air, and is very sententious: but, when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it may ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... generation in experimenting with the inductive, the subjective method in education, and the result is, to all intents and purposes, a dismal failure. The future will prove the value of the objective, the deductive—which is mine," he added with a sententious emphasis that left the puzzled rector no wiser ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... description of writing made them cultivate debate. Their complacent indifference to time made deliberative assembly a prolonged, never-wearying joy. The chiefs met in council like Homer's heroes—the commons sitting round and muttering guttural applause or dissent. The speeches abounded in short sententious utterances, in proverbs, poetic allusions and metaphors borrowed from legends. The Maori orator dealt in quotations as freely as the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, and his hearers caught them with as much relish as ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... With that sententious maxim, which, indeed, he uttered in his native Italian, Riccabocca turned round and renewed his soothing invitations to confidence. A friend in need is a friend indeed, even if he come in the guise of a Papist and wizard. All Lenny's ancient dislike to the foreigner had gone, and he told ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... editions of the Poems. At the same time, they have been, in some cases, too hastily attributed to Sir Walter himself. For instance, that in The Legend of Montrose, ch. xiv., assigned to The Tragedy of Brennoralt (not 'valt,' as misprinted), is really from Sir John Suckling's sententious play (act iv. sc. 1), ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... show the erudition of the author, and a comparatively slight examination raises our estimation of his sagacity and wisdom. These essays, the last productions of his pen, are not unworthy of circulation with those of Lord Bacon, of which they frequently remind us by apt allusions, sententious definitions, clear-headed distinctions, and sharp antitheses, no less than by profound insight into the workings of human nature. We had marked passages for quotation, which our limits will not permit. One, however, we must cite, for the incidental light it throws on the character of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted waistcoat announced dinner from the foot of the terrace, and they moved slowly toward the house. There was a concerted interest in the faces they ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... nodded approbation of this sentiment, and the younger Pliny, who happened also to be within hearing, uttered the sententious word "gosh" and clenched his fist, which was taken as proof of assent also, on his part. But, the Americans of the guard, all of whom were the tools of Joel's and the miller's arts, manifested a coldness that ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... remarkable and well-known words of the Roman general, I beg to forward two more sententious ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... sneer, to these sententious commonplaces derived at second-hand from King James that great kings were often very indifferent to injuries sustained by their friends. Moreover, there was an eminent sovereign, he continued, who was even very patient under affronts directly offered ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... like Crow Hill. He'd tell her to apply for the position. It would take about five minutes to put out that independent Amanda Reist and vote in the other girl—it just takes some people to plan! He, Mr. Mertzheimer, had planned it! Probably in his limited education he had never read that sententious line regarding what often happens to the best laid plans ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... he achieved total failure. Grattan followed him after the Union, but retained the attention if not the power of Dublin days. Neither influenced English affairs, and their eloquence curiously was considered cold and sententious. Their rhapsody appeared artificial, and their exposition labored. The failure of these men was no stigma. What is called "Irish oratory" arose with the inclusion of the Celtic under strata ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... with any expectation of profiting by the success. He felt the deer, however, lightly, his hand already trembling with the reaction of his unusual exertions, and smiled with a nod of approbation, as he said, in the emphatic and sententious ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... tossed a cigar to Tom, lighted one, and had begun to talk with a rhetorical and sententious balancing of periods—which, to his mind, full of the oratory of Prentiss, was the essence of impressiveness—when a negro woman entered the room. And hereupon he ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... perhaps better that she should be unhappy for a time, now, while she is young, than regret her name when she has taken mine.' His own words had a sententious sound in his ear and he felt that they were utterly inadequate, but he was fighting against heavy odds and did not ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... writers also mention one Challener, no doubt the Thomas Chaloner who contributed to the Mirror for Magistrates, and Nashe in his preface to Menaphon adds Thomas Atchelow, who may be plausibly identified with the Thomas Achelly who contributed verses to Watson's Hecatompathia and various sententious fragments to England's Parnassus, among them a not very happy rendering of those lines of Catullus which might almost be taken as a motto to pastoral poetry as ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... had just joined us, cast down his eyes at this tale about him, and murmured in a sententious tone of voice, "Pipes are an invention ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... shown him; our driving—the Colonel and I—post-haste to Bedford Place, lest by any means Chad might have heard of the affair and so be frightened half out of his wits; the calm indifference of that loyal darky when he ushered us into the hall and heard the Colonel's statement, and Chad's sententious comment: "In de Calaboose, Colonel! Well, fo' Gawd! what I tell ye 'bout dis caanin' bis'ness. Got to git dem barkers ready jes' I tol' ye; dat's de only thing dat'll settle dis muss,"—these and other incidents of the day equally interesting form connecting ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... natural claims and intrinsic merits be duly considered, different, far different would be my station. What! am I thus exalted in situation above my [sic] situated, (as I may say,) in the very van, exposed to the sneer of every satirical reader and sententious critic? Am I placed in a post so dangerous, and are contempt and humiliation my only reward? O, mankind, where is your gratitude? Think, generous reader, on the services I have so often rendered you: think how often, when you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the sphere of the Senator, a supper-table was the place for Mr. Figgs. The others felt that they had never before known fully all the depth of feeling, of fancy, and of sentiment that lurked under that placid, smooth, and rosy exterior. The Doctor was epigrammatic; the Senator sententious; Buttons uproarious. ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... good enough; there is no need of a finer one for confirmed conspirators; with the gossip of the club and an Inquisition catechism, he can frame his bill of indictment.—Accordingly, his intellect grasps nothing and yields him nothing; he is a sententious and overexcited declaimer, an artificial spirit always on the stretch, full of affectations,[3270] his talent reducing itself down to the rare flashes of a somber imagination, a pupil of Robespierre, as Robespierre himself is a pupil of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Fifth, but commanded by his generals, when, after fighting desperately and killing seven men with his own hand, he was compelled to surrender. His mother was at the time Regent of France, and to her he is said to have written the sententious letter, "All is lost except honor." No such letter was written by Francis,[Footnote: Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, Tom. XVI. pp. 241-42. Martin, Histoire de France, (genie edit.,) Tom. VIII. pp. 67, 68.] ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and found ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "The smug, sententious side of the bourgeoisie already existed in the time of Charles VII. But cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried merchandise was destroyed, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... interest there can be in the narrative of a simple episode in the life of a humble fugitive. What reply can be made, what explanation can be offered? Fortunately, what remains to be told may mostly be put in the sententious language ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... that it was "katta katta saja"—mere conversation; meaning that it was destitute of the quaint and figurative expressions which adorn their own poetry. Their language in common speaking is proverbial and sententious. If a young woman prove with child before marriage they observe it is daulu buah, kadian bunga—the fruit before the flower. Hearing of a person's death they say, nen matti, matti; nen idup, bekraja: kallo sampi janji'nia, apa buli ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Artful Madge's sententious observation with regard to adversity was the fruit of bitter experience. Misfortune's arrows had been raining thick and fast about her, and although she was holding her ground against them very well, she felt that adversity ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... I think, Monsieur?" I echoed to gain time. Then, thinking that a sententious answer would be the most fitting,—"Ma foi! Love is as the spark that lies latent in flint and steel: for days and weeks these two may be as close together as you please, and naught will come of it; but one fine day, a hand—the hand of chance—will strike the one against the other, ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... goddesses are they to lazy folks, Who pour down on us gifts of fluent speech, Sense most sententious, wonderful fine effect, And how to talk about it and about it, Thoughts brisk as bees, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of either, but, if possible, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... intimately acquainted with public affairs can be deceived by the pretended authenticity of this pamphlet. What does it contain? Facts perverted and heaped together without method, and related in an obscure, affected, and ridiculously sententious style. Besides what appears in it, but which is badly placed there, it is impossible not to remark the omission of what should necessarily be there, were Napoleon the author. It is full of absurd and of insignificant ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... so much and lived at a time when England was full of witty writers he was outside the charmed circle of wits who pretended not to know of his existence. "One of these authors," says another writer, "(the fellow that was pilloried, I have forgotten his name), is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue that there ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... who was fifteen years of age, went to live as farm lad with Kinvig, of Ballavolley. Kinvig was a solemn person, very stiff and starchy, and sententious in his way, a mighty man among the Methodists, and a power in the pulpit. He thought he had done an act of charity when he took Davy into his home, and Davy repaid him in due time by falling in love with Nelly, ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... a precept, it was seldom that he added any proof or argument; still more seldom that he accompanied it with what all precepts require, limitations and distinctions. His instructions were conceived in short, emphatic, sententious rules, in occasional reflections, or in round maxims. I do not think that this was a natural, or would have been a proper method for a philosopher or a moralist; or that it is a method which can be successfully ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... his degree in medicine at Leyden, and had visited England and France, he published a small collection of poems entitled Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichten. They are characterized by moral fervor, trenchant thought, and sententious pregnancy of expression—a new combination up to that time. Haller is at his best in The Alps, which, notwithstanding its abundant description, is not so much a landscape poem as a philosophic eulogy of the simple life. The text below follows Bibliothek lterer Schriftwerke der deutschen ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... lofty grave tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts; [43] ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... have carried conviction, even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... truth must be told, the conversation of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I have thought that Gray's famous line should really have been written—"the long and tedious annals of ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne |
