"Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sat on the edge of a small stone tank full of water and dabbed his swollen eye with a wet pocket-handkerchief, M. Dumollard, the mathematical master, made cheap fun of Britannic sentimentality about animals, and told us how the English noblesse were privileged to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their ankles, and sell them "au rabais" in the horse-market of Smissfeld; and that they paid men to box each other to death on the stage of Drury Lane, and all ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... haunting, impressionist war sketches of his that all London talked about, after the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see! The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work, which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... Genlis' "Veillees du Chateau," and "Adele et Theodore," were rubbish, if not poison. The novels of Florian were genuine and simple romances, less mischievous, I incline to think, upon the whole, than the educational Countess's mock moral sentimentality; but Chateaubriand's "Atala et Chactas," with its picturesque pathos, and his powerful classical novel of "Les Martyrs," were certainly unfit reading for young girls of excitable feelings and wild ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... none of the sentimentality so common at that age, and it can be proved that she had never an attachment, nor was disappointed in love, as has ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... "Rotten sentimentality!" exclaimed Lawrence. "The curse of the age. Oh, there's no doubt she was clever. She played her cards so well that she succeeded in deceiving the principal looker-on ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... rightful influence. After publishing his greatest poem, The Excursion, the tide of generous appreciation set in. In 1843, Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His pure and fervent poetry was a protest against the diseased sentimentality of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... is extremely good reading from end to end; it abounds in entertaining and exciting episodes, is wholly void of sentimentality, and enforces in the most unmistakable and wholesome way the duty ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... such provision was necessary for them. He acknowledged that they had a large share of physical suffering to endure, but asserted that Nature, to preserve her balance, must have arranged their minds so as to render them incapable of suffering in any other way. Sentimentality, hysteria, and silliness, he said, were at the bottom of all their mental troubles, which did ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. "Human creatures," says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... regain the kingdom which belongs alone to inspiration. Science and industry enabled them to galvanize the corpse of art; into this they breathed the breath of the religion a la mode, of fashionable sensuousness and prevalent sentimentality. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... gratifying shelter from the scorching sun. Not a sound was heard but the gentle ripple of a limpid stream, breaking over the boulders on its course towards the ravine below. But it was hardly the moment to ponder on the poetic scene, for fatigue and hunger had almost overcome sentimentality, and I got as quickly as I could to the first resting-place. This I found to be a native cane-grower's plantation bungalow, where quite a number of persons was assembled, the occasion of the meeting ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... companions had been treated in the same way, and according to public opinion in that part of the country there was nothing abnormal in the proceeding. Indeed, it may be said in general that there is very little romance or sentimentality about Russian peasant marriages. In this as in other respects the Russian peasantry are, as a class, extremely practical and matter-of-fact in their conceptions and habits, and are not at all prone to indulge in sublime, ethereal sentiments of any kind. They have little or nothing of what may ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day—an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics—but land! can a body ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... seems still and full of tender sound and colour, and we, like Millet, seem "to hear the bell." This is the only picture he painted which is full of the sentimentality he so much disliked. It is a great picture, but we need to know the title in order to ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... emphasize the anniversary, including a vigorous attack upon the saints' days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... who begged his mother not to expose herself to such remarks. They then saw each other in the gardens, or in some of the churches; for, like many other women of similar characteristics, she had become devote as she grew old, as much from an overflow of idle sentimentality as from a passion for honors and ceremonies. In these rare and brief interviews Charlotte talked all the time, as was her habit, but with a worn, sad air. She said, however, that she was happy and at peace, and that she had every confidence in M. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the Curtain descends upon all that a sympathetic audience can possibly desire to know of what must be once and for all the story of a life-time. "The rest is silence." Throughout the play there is no parade of false sentimentality, no tawdry virtue, no copy-book morality, no vicious silliness; and, so well constructed is the plot, that there is no need of a wearisome extra Act, by way of postscript, to tell us how all the characters met again at the North Pole or Land's End; how everybody explained everything ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... effeminately sensual, playing upon the vanity of his patrons, playing upon their vulgar sentimentality, playing upon their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is? Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... her eyes, looking very straight out through gold-rimmed spectacles, had a penetrating brightness about them that was a little formidable. It was not what one would call a good-natured face. But good-natured sentimentality was the last thing Rose ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... journeys, and was still as far as ever from any trace of his brother. Purvis had ridden over several times from his own estancia, bringing his little boy with him. His treatment of the boy was affectionate to the point of sentimentality. He looked after him with a woman's carefulness, was over-anxious about his health, and treated him as though he were much younger than his ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... artistically—his invariable wear being light, loose-fitting suits, very fine shirts, and large collars and cuffs. Everything seemed to suit his upright figure and quiet, assured air. He was sensitive to the pitch of sentimentality, and, when reading a pathetic passage, his voice would begin to tremble and the tears to come into his eyes, until he had to lay the book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love songs of his friend A— or gipsy ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action. As we are afraid that, if we handle this part of the argument after our own manner, we shall incur the reproach of sentimentality, a word which, in the sacred language of the Benthamites, is synonymous with idiocy, we will quote what Mr Mill himself says on the subject, in his Treatise ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture—no reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the like, and made ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... the possibility of re-establishing peace instead of everlasting war—is the pernicious sentimentality of phrasemongers. There is a law of evolution by which it follows that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act in an evil way. "ENTRONS AU PALAIS DE LA GUERRE." There is the law of evolution, and therefore ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... pity for such a service needs to be earnestly and constantly cultivated. It only follows as the result of spiritual processes in the preacher's own soul. It is not the mere outflowing of a natural kindliness of disposition, of inborn good nature. It is more than mere sloppy sentimentality. That kind of pity, if you may call it by such a name, never tells the truth excepting when it is pleasant, never preaches a sermon of rebuke, never reasons concerning "judgment to come." There is no such word as Hell in its vocabulary; there is no accusation in its programme. The ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... miracle occurred. The Senora threw off the nightmare of selfish sorrow and spiritual sentimentality which had held her in bondage. She took the cigarito from her lips with a scornful air, and repeated ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... sculptor who delights to honor the laborer and the craftsman and has supplied the figures for niches and keystone space and the tympanum and secondary groups in the portal of Varied Industries with evident affection. He treats the subject of labor with dignity, according it respect and not sentimentality. In this secondary or crowning group, a strong young man is taking the burden of labor from the shoulders of the last generation - an old workman, bowed but still hale and vigorous. There is a sense of responsibility and earnestness in ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... another route, so as to pass as many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it came, the effect was of undeniable ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Caught between two fires, without resources or organisation, annihilation was before them. Now the English, for their own security, had the greatest interest in preventing the extermination of white men by natives; and on that ground, apart from all sentimentality, they had never ceased to protest against the methods employed by the Boers, as the surest means of bringing about that result. Theophilus Shepstone, who possessed great influence over the Zulus, was sent to Pretoria. Unable, even with the help of their President, to bring ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... complicated sounds from the fair outside, from which now and again the voices of the Roman ice-venders detached themselves, even the tapping of the heavy boots of the dancers upon the floor of brick—all things in this hour moved him to a certain dreariness of the spirit which was touched with sentimentality. This fair day was coming to an end. He felt as if everything ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thinking of the white figure going up a green slope one summer day; then, as if chiding himself for sentimentality, he set Psyche down with great care and began to talk about a course of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... as the heat of midsummer opens up the pores, the youthful human seems to become exposed to curious and violent attacks of sentimentality? It's a fact. All the world recognizes that the Summer Girl is especially a prey to this insidious complaint; that no matter how modest, reserved and circumspect she may be as a Winter Girl, when she breaks her Summer chrysalis all the butterfly nature within her is given wing, inward and ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... brought upon society by the free black population, should persist in declaring that duty and humanity call upon us to give the slaves their freedom. It really appears to me that there is entirely too much "namby pamby sentimentality" and affected feeling exhibited respecting the condition of slaves. Do these individuals believe that benevolence and humanity command us to turn loose upon society a set of persons who confessedly only serve to swell the amount of crime, while they add nothing to ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... General having descended to the parterre for a few moments. He was astonished, on entering, to find traces of tears on the young woman's cheeks. Her eyes were even moist. She seemed displeased at being surprised in the very act of sentimentality. ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... agitate Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. "The mother has spoiled the young rascal," groaned the Major inwardly, "with her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall not dare show my head!" And he thought with an inexpressible pang that he must give up Lord ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... acre of ground in the centre of an artificial lake. The two inscriptions that the prince chose for his sepulchre illustrate, appropriately enough, the sharply contrasting qualities of his strange individuality—his romantic sentimentality, and his callous cynicism. The first inscription was ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the first chord) Please don't put a lot of sentimentality into the opening words. They should ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... were lovely and lovable to the last degree, but cautious and tormentingly self-restrained when it came to loving. At the first intimation of dangerous sentimentality on the part of Old Heck the widow would suddenly and without an instant's warning change the subject. When Skinny had been pensive and silent for half an hour or so and would then start, in a halting and quivering voice, to say something, Carolyn June invariably ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... the day's jaunt has been the absence of the appeal to sentimentality which Judith of late, especially since her return from Paris, has been overfond of making. This idle habit of mind, for such it is in reality, has been arrested by an intellectual interest. One of her great friends is Willoughby, the economic statistician, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... I suit you," said Polly, devoutly hoping she could succeed in avoiding the sin of teasing on the one hand, and of sentimentality ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... possibility of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied, she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall, powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her own image, for whom she would have ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your account of your fellow-guests at the Moorhead Inn. No, I do not misunderstand your letter; nor do I credit you with any foolish sentimentality, or Susie-like flutterings. Jim Airth stands to you for an abstract thing—uncompromising manhood, in its strength and assurance; very attractive after the loneliness and sense of being cut adrift, which have been your portion lately. Only, remember—where ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... a condition of extreme sentimentality]. I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it. The magic of this Irish scene, and—I really don't want to be personal, Miss Reilly; but the charm ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... very dear brother she had ever regarded him, for her affection, though intense and profound, was as entirely free from all taint of sentimentality, as that which she entertained for his mother; and her pure young heart had never indulged a feeling that could have coloured her cheek with confusion had the world searched ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... deepened by turns in her cheeks, and the hand that clasped the ivory fan shook as it had never shaken before in the course of a life full of risks and dangers. But then no man had ever looked at her as this man did. She had outstared insolence and snubbed sentimentality. She had never had to face such an honest, pure-hearted worship as this young prince brought and laid silently at her feet. No need for him to tell her that she embodied every virtue and every perfection of which human nature is capable. She knew it, and the knowledge broke the very backbone ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... the sentimentality of seeing him off from the station, and Mrs. Gourlay was too feckless to propose it for herself. Janet had offered to convoy him, but when the afternoon came she was down with a racking cold. He was alone as he strolled on the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... nothing more touching than the sight of a nation in search of its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of character that the multitude of men can ever hope to find their blind ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sentimentality which is generally pleasing to Quince, Snug, Bottom, and the like. If he is mistaken it is in suggesting that this sickliness is confined to the company of carpenters and bellows-menders, and is not equally to be found among those of the high estate of Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta herself. But ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... to the public his own sense of its imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem—the diffuseness of the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of which ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless sentimentality or a ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... not. Henselt was only a German who fell asleep and dreamed of Chopin. To a Thalberg-ian euphony he has added a technical figuration not unlike Chopin's, and a spirit quite Teutonic in its sentimentality. Rubinstein calls Chopin the exhalation of the third epoch in art. He certainly closed one. With a less strong rhythmic impulse and formal sense Chopin's music would have degenerated into mere overperfumed ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... temptation of saying to oneself, "Where shall I be in an hour's time?" One gazes with a subtle feeling of affection on one's limbs, and wonders, "Where shall I get it?" Subconsciously one is amused and a little ashamed of such concessions to sentimentality. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to go and check the range-finders' figures, or prepare the headlines ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts and "womanly" women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan's supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... scorn for rank and wealth, dreams of immortality with posterity. His greatest successes with the public were secured by "Poor Liza," and "Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter," which served as much-admired models for sentimentalism to succeeding generations. Sentimentality was no novelty in Russia; it had come in with translations from English novels, such as Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," and the like; and imitations of them in Russia. "Sensibility" was held to ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... the notion of a category. Once it had been a mere abstraction; of no possible use except as a convenient cell for referring (as in a nest of boxes), which may perhaps as much degrade the idea as a relative of my own degraded the image of the crescent moon by saying, in his abhorrence of sentimentality, that it reminded him of the segment from his own thumb-nail when clean cut by an instrument called a nail-cutter. This was the Aristotelian notion. But Kant could not content himself with this idea. His own theory (1) as to time and space, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their power. A truly philanthropic sentiment is most potent for good in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... a very convenient plan," Gifford replied dryly. "All the same, if I can retrieve my evening kit, which has gone astray, I hope to enjoy myself at Wynford Place to-night without being troubled with undue sentimentality." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... dealings in cloth and other goods with the firm of Anselmi di Briata, of Casale, a small city on the Po), "I will give you everything for twenty-eight giliati."[4] It does not appear that Paolo's correspondents were moved in their answer by any feelings of sentimentality or of friendship: on the contrary, the tone of the letter was clearly commercial, they having made an offer of twenty-three giliati less than demanded. Paolo Stradivari in his reply, dated June 4, 1776, says: "Putting ceremony aside, I write ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... were obviously staid business-men, differing widely in character from the street Spaniard, whom I have already copiously described. Some were Germans, thinned by the climate, and sharpened up to the true Yankee point of competition; very little smack of Fatherland was left about them,—no song, no sentimentality, not much quivering of the heart-strings at remembering the old folks at home, whom some of them have not seen in twenty years, and never will see again. To be sure, in such a hard life as theirs, with no social surroundings, and grim death meeting them at every corner, there is nothing for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... young Narcissus, who represented love in such a simple, wholesome guise—or at least so it had seemed to be. Then she would shake off the image, and tell herself it was but seeming, as the result had proved, and so she would accuse herself of weakness and sentimentality. These thoughts were getting to be inconvenient. They haunted her too persistently, and at last she began to wish for the time to come when her days would again be too crowded with engagements for her to indulge in ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... things are at present," Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, "is like this. We'd meant, as I told ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... extravagant—others may think it sublime, and be right) they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong, which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster, he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... than that, he felt a sudden sense of the absolute sentimentality of his request, and the consciousness that he was about to invite the familiar confidence of this strange woman—whose son had forged his ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... a blessed drink gin must be, seeing it can move a rogue like that to sentimentality—nay, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Democrats is to favour the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or quite independent nationalities as possible, just as many languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all controls, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the world clean and sweet. The Liberals will not face the plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. They will not ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... a true and real sense it is God's own doing," and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... flashed across his dark features like a meteor through a cloudy sky and was gone. "I—suspected, mon ami. But—I did not even tell myself." That part of him that was French—a species of volatile sentimentality—sounded in the words like the echo of a laugh in a minor key. "I made a valet of her. I suffered her to clean my boots and brush my clothes. I kept her in ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... as regards other women is too low for him to heap upon you. Believe that the French men are sympathetic because they laugh and cry openly at the theatre. But appeal to their chivalry, and they will rescue you from one discomfort only to offer you a worse. The French have sentimentality, but not sentiment. They have gallantry, but not chivalry. They have vanity, but not pride. They have religion, but not morality. They are a combination of the wildest extravagance and the strictest ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... in our minds, we wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so calm. And how soothing is this Moorish dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious melancholy!—And finally love, love translated back into Nature! Not the love of a "cultured girl!"—no Senta-sentimentality.(7) But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,—and precisely in this way Nature! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the mortal hatred between the sexes!—I know no case in which the tragic irony, which constitutes the ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... not believe me capable of religious sentimentality after what I have said of my religious opinions. Still, in these twenty years I have seen a great deal of the seamy side of the world. I have known its back-stairs, and I have discerned, in the march of events, a Power which you call Providence and I call Chance, and which my companions ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... any religion, of any ethical teaching, of any principle—to be of use to men and women at the present stage of their development—must be incontestable common sense. Ridiculous sentimentality should be ruthlessly crushed, and investigation of the meaning of Nature should be strenuously encouraged. And with clear eyes we should try to see the truth. Let those born fighters who like fighting for ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish philanderer with any girl ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... feel comfortable about having deliberately shocked Jill into paying some attention to her own situation instead of staying absorbed in the possible or probable fate of Vale. But for them to get clear was going to call for more than sentimentality on Jill's part. Lockley couldn't carry the ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... is telling on you, Cleary," said Sam. "This is all sickly sentimentality. War is war. The trouble with you is that there has been no regular campaign on to occupy your attention. This lying about doing nothing is a bad thing for everybody. Wait till the Tutonian Emperor comes out and we'll ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... a reverie; but as her expression changed from one of annoyance to something of wistfulness and sentimentality, the question of marriage with the Duke of Marshire had clearly been dismissed for that moment from her heart. At intervals a shy smile gave an almost childish tenderness to her face. Then, on a sudden, her eyelashes ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... no notice of the hungry looks of the company; he was a soldier, and concentrated his mind upon the duties of the moment. Sentimentality was no part of his nature. He was a man, and must eat; he was a soldier, and must perform the work as a ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There was no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither criticism nor narrative; ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Letters received from often remote parts of the United States had been for many years a detail of his daily experience; and even when they consisted of the request for an autograph, an application to print selections from his works, or a mere expression of schoolboy pertness or schoolgirl sentimentality, they bore witness to his wide reputation in that country, and the high esteem in which he was held there.** The names of Levi and Celia Thaxter of Boston had long, I believe, been conspicuous in ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... or weakly sentimentality, which can fail to perceive that the Romans were entirely in earnest with the liberation of Greece; and the reason why the plan so nobly projected resulted in so sorry a structure, is to be sought only in the complete ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... lay brutality; a hundred imitative louts could have written a similar chapter brutally, with the soul left out, we've loads of such "strong stuff" and it is nothing; on the other side was the still more dreadful fall into sentimentality, the tear of conscious tenderness, the redeeming glimpse of "better things" in Alf or Emmy that would at one stroke have converted their reality into a genteel masquerade. The perfection of Alf and Emmy is that at no point does a "nature's gentleman" or a "nature's lady" show through and ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... made Valencia fancy that some feeling for her might still linger: but he evidently had been speaking to himself, forgetful, for the moment, of her presence; for he turned to her with a start and a blush—"But now—I have been troubling you too long with this stupid tete-a-tete sentimentality of mine. I will make my bow, and find the Major. I am afraid, if it be possible for him to forget any one, he has forgotten me in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... to nip all silly sentimentality in the bud. The real thing is never silly," said Joyce out of ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... up, trembling like an old man, which he was, but which he never looked like save at moments of emotion like this, and told me to take the light; then stopped when he had got half-way across the room. "This is a piece of theatrical sentimentality," he said. "No, Phil, I will not go. I will not bring her into any such—Put down the lamp, and, if you will take my advice, ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies Real happiness is a state of dulness Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey) Sham spiritualism She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... handled her material freely, making additions, amplifications, and moral reflections, to the original tale. Her weaving together of incidents is artistic and her style graceful and not unpleasing. It is marked by ornamentation, sumptuousness, and French sentimentality. It shows a lack of naivete resulting from the palace setting given to her tales, making them adapted only to children of high rank. Often her tale is founded on a beautiful tradition. The Blue-Bird, one of the finest of her tales, was found ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of the whole old world—the Scapia or Figaro of the old world—infinitely able, but with all his ability consecrated to the service of his own base self. The Greekling—as Juvenal has it—in want of a dinner, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first woke to her own mind at the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... shoulders. "German sentimentality," said she. "If you mix sentiment with your cards, we shall lose the game, Count Podstadsky. Hear, then, what I have to say to you. It is true that we stand upon the brow of a precipice; but we must contemplate it fearlessly, and so we shall grow accustomed to our danger, and learn to escape ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... anything when I've been in the place so short a time. All the same, I don't want to pretend to any false modesty. I've been in Polchester long enough to be fond of it, and I'm going to be fonder of it still before I've done. I don't want to pretend to any sentimentality either, but there are broader issues than merely the fortunes of this ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Common Multiple of nearly all pleasant houses. It has the largeness and amplitude of a castle, and the plainness of decent poverty. It has none of that theatricality which it is supposed to have, none of the dreaminess or the sentimentality with which Protestants endow it. He had passed just now through, first, a network of small stairways, archways, vestibules and passages, and then along two immense corridors with windows on one ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... for instance, chief amongst the incidents of Mr. Cleveland's administration, that the oath of office was administered upon his mother's Bible. Many people regarded this as mere sentimentality. To me it meant more than words could express. The best of Bibles is the mother's. It meant that the man who chose to be sworn in on such a book had a grateful remembrance. It was as though he had said, "If it had not been ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... circumstance of their authors adopting the name of some hero. The manners are the modern antique; and the characters are a sort of beings made out of the old epical, the Arcadian pastoral, and the Parisian sentimentality and affectation of the days of Voiture.[120] The Astrea of D'Urfe greatly contributed to their perfection. As this work is founded on several curious circumstances, it shall be the subject of the following article; for it may be considered as a literary curiosity. The Astrea was ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... during his lifetime, but a small collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker moods are colored by his inborn love ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... incidents interested him, not ideas, nor even characters, and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective. Now cynicism, in France, supplies a sufficient basis for all these requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the admirable story "Boule de Suif," perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote, with a story of somewhat similar motive—Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Constantinople, where he demanded the total withdrawal of the Turkish forces. This was acceded to, and Turkey thus lost the hold which it had acquired upon the lawless Montenegrins. The idea of Ottoman decay acquired daily fresh strength, and a maudlin sentimentality was excited in behalf of these Christian savages. Taking advantage of this, they made constant forays across the border, stirring up by their example such of the borderers as were disposed to rise, and using force to compel those who would have preferred ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Battifol, in his History of the Roman Breviary (English ed.), writes: "We owe a just debt of gratitude to those who gave us the antiphons of the Blessed Virgin ... four exquisite compositions, though in style enfeebled by sentimentality." ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... Flint. "Your sentimentality spoils your happiness. You let two weeks poison the other fifty. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time had they to ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... you. I am no trifler, believe me; I love you. I am the man who loves you because he has found in you qualities that are inestimable. You are one of those perfect creatures who have as much brains as sentiment; and the sentimentality that permeates you is not the sickly sentimentality of ordinary women. It is that gloriously beautiful faculty of tenderness which characterizes great souls, and which one never meets elsewhere in the world. And then, you ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... almost careful smartness and conventionality. There was something primitive in her, too, and she became aware of that now. Hitherto she had been inclined to believe that she was essentially complex, cerebral, free from any trace of sentimentality, quiveringly responsive to the appealing voices of the arts, healthily responsive to the joys of athleticism almost in the way of a Greek youth in the early days of the world, but that she was free from all taint of ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... face truth, you should have a surer ideal than we have found. When this comes, there will be less sentimentality but much deeper feeling about marriage. I have tried to show you a different ideal, and picture for you the Jewish home, where the exalted esteem in which women are held is the outcome of their attitude to marriage and the Jewish way of life: it is an ideal ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... she'll have to know sometime! I must say I cannot understand the way you've kept this dreadful thing from her. It's pure sentimentality. ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... was notoriously reticent—almost inarticulate; but in song he found self-expression, and all the romance and poetry of the sea are breathed into his shanties, where simple childlike sentimentality alternates with the Rabelaisian humour of the grown man. Whatever landsmen may think about shanty words—with their cheerful inconsequence, or light-hearted coarseness—there can be no two opinions about the tunes, which, as folk-music, are a ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... a moment. He was looking at her and thinking how perfect in every way she was now, as she stood there purged of sentimentality, all aglow with curiosity to know how her nefarious plans had succeeded. It was his Ann who stood there, not the author of "The ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... gradual abandonment of natural form the "angle" school is paralleled by the "curve" school, which also descends wholly from Gauguin. The best known representative is Maurice Denis. But he has become a slave to sentimentality, and has been left behind. Matisse is the most prominent French artist who has followed Gauguin with curves. In Germany a group of young men, who form the Neue Kunstlevereinigung in Munich, work almost entirely in sweeping curves, and have reduced natural objects purely ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... client is an eccentric maiden-lady of sixty-five, with a lot of distant relatives who bother her life out while waiting for her to die. I am her only intimate friend, but even I cannot prevent her from doing all sorts of queer things in her taste for sentimentality. You see, poor woman, when she was very young she had a lover of just about your age (she wears his portrait perpetually in a locket about her neck), who died. He was in business, and doing very well. Several times already, on this account, she has helped young men who ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... against our foe," Rashevitch went on in the tone of a preacher, holding up his right hand. "May I appear to the riff-raff not as Pavel Ilyitch, but as a mighty, menacing Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Let us give up sloppy sentimentality; enough of it! Let us all make a compact, that as soon as a plebeian comes near us we fling some careless phrase straight in his ugly face: 'Paws off! Go back to your kennel, you cur!' straight in his ugly face," Rashevitch went on gleefully, flicking his crooked finger ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Teddy that she knew so well? This side of him was the same, and it was a side that pleased her; but this was all she ever saw of him now. Where was his sentimentality—those old, varying moods of impetuous love-making, of fanciful, quixotic devotion, of heart-breaking gloom, of alternating, absurd tenderness and haughty dignity? His nature had been a sensitive one, his temperament bordering closely ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... with religious fervor that he had been saved a second time from a mistake which would have wrecked his whole future. If he had yielded to the momentary weakness of the past night,—the outcome of a sickly sentimentality to which he recognized now, in the light of reflection, that he was entirely too prone,—he would have regretted it soon enough. The black streak would have been sure to come out in some form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children. He saw clearly enough, in this hour of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the ground for God very ably, and then makes a well-meaning gesture in the vacant space. There is no help nor strength in his gesture unless God is there. Without God, the "Service of Man" is no better than a hobby or a sentimentality or an hypocrisy in the undisciplined prison ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... sentimentality, and the two old market people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... procession of the virtues passes by, there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, it is not so effective a book as The Nabob, nor such a unique and marvellous work of art as Numa Roumestan, due allowance being made for the intrusion of sentimentality into the latter. Daudet thought Numa the "least incomplete" of his works; it is certainly inclusive enough, since some critics are struck by the tragic relations subsisting between the virtuous discreet Northern wife and the peccable, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... forgive him, but when she has genuinely forgiven him, the glamour of love will usually have disappeared. If she insists upon shutting herself up from other love for his sake, she should question herself as to the part sentimentality and perversity bear in ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... of American poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before seen a woman. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with the wholesome, pleasing sentimentality of the old bachelor who has not turned crusty.... ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... out of patience; and if we did not give utterance aloud to our thoughts, I shrewdly suspect if those thoughts had formed themselves into words, those words would have sounded very much like, "Nonsensical sentimentality!" "strange infatuation!" but nothing could be said with propriety, and the engagement was fully entered into. Some time had necessarily to elapse before its fulfillment, however, for the lover was but twenty; but it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... is a great outbreak of sentimentality among the callowlings. They have pictures (oh, such caricatures!) to carry in breast-pockets—or locks of hair, like mine. Their hearts are inflammable as those of the flaxen-haired youths I met afterwards in the universities of Germany, only living on oatmeal, without sausages, and less florid ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Blinker tells Florence that he loves her. So accustomed is she to this display of sentimentality in her cavaliers that she merely laughs. He persists, and she indicates a belief that he is just like the rest. Mention of "the rest" awakes question in Blinker. He learns that she meets men indiscriminately. He has a horror of this evidence of what he considers to be moral laxity, and when Florence ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social history of the time; but the idea which ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... unsatisfactory mood until luncheon. Nothing pleased her. The novels were stupid. She was tired of love tales—why could not people find something else to write about? She was sick of such namby-pamby sentimentality; and then they were so untrue to life. Stories in real life did not always end happily, or there would not be so many old maids in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the application of this. Progress in religion is the slowest, because man is kept back by sentimentality, by the efforts of parents, by old associations. A thousand unseen tendrils are twining about him that he must necessarily break if he advances. In other departments of knowledge inducements are held out ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... there is a constant intrusion of ethical reflections, which will doubtless much edify all young ladies of a tender age. These would be well enough if they appeared to have any base in solid moral principle, but they are somewhat offensive as the mere sentimentality of conscience and religion, introduced for the purposes of fine writing. Suspicion, also, always attaches to the morality which exhibits itself on rhetorical stilts, and the refinement which is always proclaiming itself refined. Since the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... left," said Mr. Wharton angrily, "for soft sentimentality. Well;—she must take her bed as she makes it. It is very hard on me, I know. Considering what she used to be, it is marvellous to me that she should have so little idea left of doing her duty ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope |
