"Sophistication" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in motive, sophistication, and strength, terrorist organizations share a basic structure ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... exclaimed Washington as he walked along the street leading from the depot, a valise in either hand. "His state ob health am equal to de sophistication ob de soporiferousness." ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... that prevailed at York Fort was, that "soft" (in other words, straightforward, unsuspecting) youths had to undergo a long process of learning-by- experience: first, believing everything, and then doubting everything, ere they arrived at that degree of sophistication which enabled them to ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: "Unless its being of that particular shade between brown ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... might be obtained by a sacrifice of candour, and that he seemed often to argue merely for arguing's sake. It was said of the great Lord Holland that he always put his opponent's case better than the opponent put it for himself. No one ever said this of Mr. Balfour; and his tendency to sophistication led Mr. Humphrey Paul to predict that his name "would always be had in honour wherever hairs were split." His manner and address (except when he was debating) were always courteous and conciliatory; those who were brought into close contact with him liked him, and those who worked under ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... which she heard made no difference to her. His ambiguity of utterance, backed by assurance and illumined by the divine fire of inspiration, awakened curiosity in the placid breast of this Desdemona of the mesas. It required no sophistication on her part to realize that this caballero was not as the vaqueros she had heretofore known. He made no boorish jests; his eyes were not as the eyes of many that had gazed at her in a way that had tinged her dusky cheeks with warm resentment. She felt ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... much true and sound policy, so much delightfull and pertinent history, so many liuely descriptions of the shipping and wares in his time of all the nations almost in Christendome, and such a subtile discouery of outlandish merchants fraud, and of the sophistication of their wares, that needes you must acknowledge, that more matter and substance could in no wise be comprised in so little a roome. [Footnote: The poem here alluded to was written between 1416 and 1438, as ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... mountain-peaks. Marietta could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper 'caster' which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... young a poet, and are interesting as showing how rapidly he had outgrown the influence of any other of his poetic kindred. "Johannes Agricola" is significant as being the first of those dramatic studies of warped religiosity, of strange self-sophistication, which have afforded so much matter for thought. In its dramatic concision, its complex psychological significance, and its unique, if to unaccustomed ears somewhat barbaric, poetic beauty, "Porphyria" is still ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... intermixture, alloyage[obs3], matrimony; junction &c. 43; combination &c. 48; miscegenation. impregnation; infusion, diffusion suffusion, transfusion; infiltration; seasoning, sprinkling, interlarding; interpolation &c. 228 adulteration, sophistication. [Thing mixed] tinge, tincture, touch, dash, smack, sprinkling, spice, seasoning, infusion, soupcon. [Compound resulting from mixture] alloy, amalgam; brass, chowchow[obs3], pewter; magma, half-and-half, melange, tertium quid[Lat], miscellany, ambigu|, medley, mess, hotchpot[obs3], pasticcio[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Reformation theology. The French Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication with many educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of serious consideration. College students modestly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... besieger. The fascinations of the forbidden fruit are not dangled at first before Eve, but an apparently innocent doubt is filtered into her ear. And is not that the way in which we are still snared? The reality of moral distinctions, the essential wrongness of the sin, is obscured by a mist of sophistication. 'There is no harm in it' steals into some young man's or woman's mind about things that were forbidden at home, and they are half conquered before they know that they have been attacked. Then comes the next besieger's trench, much nearer the wall—namely, denial of the fatal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... young man and a good lawyer, and was entitled to the position which he had attained so young; but, the son of a man of rather exceptional means, he had been educated at a city college, and had a sophistication which Solomon viewed with deep suspicion. Moreover, he discarded the garb which Mr. Peaslee regarded as sacred. He was not in black. Instead, he wore a light gray business suit, his collar was very knowing in cut, and his cravat of dark blue was ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... young—a very great deal younger, Duncan thought, than when they had been classmates, what time Duncan shared his rooms with Kellogg: very much younger and suffering exquisitely from over-sophistication. His drawl barely escaped being inimitable; his air did not escape it. "Smitten with my old trouble," Duncan appraised him: "too much money... Heaven knows I hope ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... singularly strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see, matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what appeared to be extreme sophistication. After the shock of the tie the loose gray London worsted coat and trousers made only a passing impression; and from my involuntary summary of the whole surprising man, which had taken less than an instant, my dazed brain came back and was held and concentrated by the beauty of ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... knees, and let the blankness of her beauty exclaim upon the subtlety of her replies, plainly measuring the power of her provocation against the impoverished quality that camp and grove, court and schools, might leave upon august Roman sensibilities. It was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its concentration behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the igniting, flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage. Alicia, when it was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, "How the modern woman goes off upon side issues?" to which ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the American way, we've organized cheese-eating. There's an annual cheese week, and a cheese month (October). We even boast a mail-order Cheese-of-the-Month Club. We haven't yet reached the point of sophistication, however, attained by a Paris cheese club that meets regularly. To qualify for membership you have to identify two hundred basic cheeses, and you ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... Her sophistication was kindly in the main. She combined it with an easy tolerance of weakness, and an invincible and cheery romanticism, as Willy Cameron discovered the night they first went to a moving picture theater together. She frankly wept and ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... told about playing tennis at the Prospect Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk some day, Una was certain; he would own a car and be seen in evening clothes and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe of his sophistication. He was the only man who made ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude life. The sophistication which embroiders the will-to-live had been stripped clean off. These men helped you to understand the state of mind which puts a city to the sack, and makes victims especially of the innocent and the defenceless. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... almost all mediaeval poetry are no doubt discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits the whole scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or swoon) ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... stoop to sophistication, with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a pocket ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... at work nor at play, who were to visit the courts, the police, the wrecks, the criminals, conventions, politicians, reformers, lovers, and haters, and bring back the news of the city's day. A common almost racial sophistication stamped their expression. They pawed over telephone books, argued with indifferent, emotionless profanity among themselves on items of amazing import; pounded nonchalantly upon typewriters, lolled with their feet ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... predisposed him; he felt a little contrite, too—he remembered how her voice had suddenly dragged and fallen flat at his abrupt farewell.... She was disappointed in his reception of her offers of peace—she had been incapable of appreciating the attitude his sophistication was bound to take up in the face of such an outburst. She had proved herself, too, a generous soul—frankly owning herself in the wrong and trying by every means to make atonement.... Few women would have been at once so frank and so practical in their repentance. That he suspected the repentance ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... shown to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once again to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows! It was as if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden of their sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left with nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred years, a like element ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... be thought of here. Alix was different. She was not an impressionable, hair-brained flapper, such as he had come in contact with in past experiences. Despite her sprightly, thoroughly up-to-the-moment ease of manner, and an air of complete sophistication, she was singularly old-fashioned in a great many respects. While she was bright, amusing, gay, there was back of it all a certain reserve that forbade familiarity,—sufficient, indeed, to inspire unexampled caution on his part. She invited friendship but not familiarity; ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... taxicab, a taxicab apparently being the open sesame. One might have gone afoot and have looked ever so much like a "good thing" and he would not have been admitted. But such is the simplicity of the sophistication of the keepers of such places that a motor car opens ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals—Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly transcendental ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... they find themselves temporarily, and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of judgment ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... am in a land where Time has lagged, where simple people timorously hug the Past. How far away now seems the welter and swelter of the city, the hectic sophistication of the streets. The sense of wonder is strong in me again, the joy of looking at familiar things as if one were seeing ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"—one without any hair on his head—high living ungrew it; and we can prove it—the other a young man whose worth and sophistication he impressed upon you in two convincing ways—he swore that all the wine was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible excellencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry |
