"Sentimentalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Review, think, and think rightly, that we have some cause to be indignant. The great cause why modern humor and modern sentimentalism repel us, is that they are unwarrantably familiar. Now, Mr. Sterne, the Superfine Reviewer thinks, "was a true sentimentalist, because he was ABOVE ALL THINGS a true gentleman." The flattering inference is obvious: let us be thankful for having an elegant moralist watching over us, and learn, if not too old, to imitate his high-bred politeness and catch ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Some sentimentalist had once said that no man who cared for animals could be wholly bad. Inexperience inclined her to believe it. Then too, she had that inclination for overlooking offences committed against precept, which appears to be one of those edifying human traits peculiar to neither sex and common ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness. But he was not in the least a sentimentalist. The womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression. It was like a delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man. For his humor was exuberant. He seldom laughed loud, but his smile was sweet and appreciative. Then the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Didn't he know that she was ailing and needed him? He answered maliciously: "I fancied that your trip might upset your nerves. I am really beginning to believe you care more for your young composer than you do for me. Ellenora Vibert, sentimentalist!—what ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Sentimentalist must have had his exquisite memories, even then, as he sat brooding over his dull mechanical work, he whose burning eloquence about Liberty and Justice and Simplicity and Nature was already sowing the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... father. He was a savage sentimentalist who had his own decided views of his paternal prerogatives. He was a terror; but the only evidence of imaginative faculty about Fyne was his pride in his wife's parentage. It stimulated his ingenuity too. Difficult—is it not?—to introduce ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... is practically the same—sentiment which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the private sentiments of the writer. This is Shelley; a sentimentalist pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning; unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the "Ode to Liberty," ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... that something was a mere nothing. It was the creed of Young England; and even greater imaginative power might have failed in the effort to instil the most temporary vitality into that flimsy collection of sham beliefs. A mere sentimentalist might possibly have introduced it in such a way as to impress us at least with his own sincerity. But how is such doctrine to be uttered by lips which are, at the same time, pouring out the shrewdest ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... "Nature is no sentimentalist,—does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.—The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... remarkable episode in his long life. It was as "the author of Werther" that he was known to the reading world, until after his death the publication of the completed Faust gradually effaced the conception of Goethe as the master-sentimentalist ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Fosdick had told him in Rome, the young man was a Sentimentalist with no exact vision of life. His heart was perpetually distorting whatever his mind told him was fact. This woman, with her beauty, her love of music, had touched him at the lyric moment of life, when reality was but the unstable foundation for dream. Life as might ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... provisions he drew a yearly allowance when not required at sea, and extra prize-money when on active service. Yet the bait did not tempt him, and the system was soon discarded as useless and inoperative. Bounty, defined by some sentimentalist as a "bribe to Neptune," for a while made a stronger appeal; but, ranging as it did from five to almost any number of pounds under one hundred per head, it proved a bribe indeed, and by putting an irresistible premium on desertion threatened to decimate ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... least what Massachusetts is—wave, wind, soil, and the life therein and thereon. He begins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify or to study the narrower laws of organic development; or romantically as the sentimentalist, who intones his "Ah!" at the sight of dying leaves or the cocoon becoming moth. It is all human, and yet all intensely practical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... softly at the furious cries of folk who know so little and vociferate so much. After each whirlwind of sympathy has reached its full strength, there is generally a strong disposition among the sentimentalists to do something. No mere words for the genuine sentimentalist; he packs his sentimental self into a cab, he engages the services of a policeman, and he plunges into the nasty deeps of the City's misery. He treats each court and alley as a department of a menagerie, and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... shocking. Examine in this connection Mr. Moore's Mummer's Wife, our greatest English realist novel, and for the matter of that one of the supreme things in English fiction, and you will see that the scrupulous fidelity of the author's method, though it denies him those concessions to a sentimentalist or romantic view of life which are the common implements of fiction, denies him no less the extremities of horror or loathsomeness. The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a dipsomaniac and dies from ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of a universal human experience. Might not any one of us who had endured it turn upon the pagan and sentimentalist, crying in the mood of a Swift or a Voltaire, "Ca vous amuse, la vie"? The abstract natural rights of the eighteenth century smack of academic complacency before this. The indignation we feel against the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV who cried "L'etat c'est moi!" ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... too much to environment," his companion observed. "In the life of the cities you would be a sentimentalist." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... orthodox sentimentalist he could claim no compassion. He had lost not his heart's love but a very comfortable settlement; he was wounded more in his vanity than in his affections; he had wasted not his life, only one of his few remaining ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... patriotism and love of country. Those who risked death in the demon's honor got iron crosses and bronze crosses, but any one who dared to call it by its true name, if a man, received the decoration of the white feather; if a woman, was regarded as a sentimentalist and merely a woman, and told that she did not understand ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... "Yes, I mean that. I'm a business man, not a sentimentalist. I don't want love. I've got no time for it. But when it comes to giving a girl of the right sort a square deal and a good time, why you'll find I'm as good as there is going." He reached for her hands again, his empty, flabby chin bags quivering. "I want to help Bob, and I ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... power toward nature's, if not humanity's, ends. At the first he cares nothing for Katherine save that the rumor of her fire and spirit has pleased his wild fancy. And never is there the faintest hint of the sentimentalist about him; his is never the softness of the lover, but rather the careful prudence of the utilitarian. Yet he unstintedly admires Katherine; this is somehow felt to be so by his rather pompous implication that he would hardly be taking all this trouble about the woman ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of three-decker fiction—sat entranced. The cast-off and ill-treated wife returning to the scene of her misery—with the heiress!—grown up—and beautiful: she saw it all; she threw it all into the moulds dear to the sentimentalist. Victoria demurred to the adjective "beautiful"; suggesting "pretty—when we have fed her!" But Mrs. Penfold, with soft, shining eyes, already beheld the mother and child weeping at the knees of the Ogre, the softening of the Ogre's heart, the opening of the grim Tower to its rightful ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
