"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but know it, brain is the lord, to fashion a palace fit for the soul to inhabit. Yet still, after centuries of stumbling, reason is no more than the furtive accomplice of habit and force. Force creates, habit perpetuates, reason the sycophant sanctions. And so he drifts, not up but down, and Nature watches in anguish, self-forbidden to intervene, unless it be to annihilate. If he is to drive, and drive straight, reason must seize the reins; and the art of her driving is the art of Politics. Of that art, the aim is perfection, ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not sure whether there was any wife in the question; and in ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Emperor's daughter; has put ill-will between him and the royal family. And if Briennius bears no longer the fame of a rational man, and the renown of a good leader, he is deprived of both by following the advice of this artful sycophant." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... side, To be the appanage of pride, Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, His park where amber mornings break, And treacherously bright to show His planted isle where roses glow? O Day! and is your mightiness A sycophant to smug success? Will the sweet sky and ocean broad Be fine accomplices to fraud? O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray! Back, back to chaos, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... on your tongue and in your pen, you have a resource, not only greatly valuable in itself, but a resource that you can be deprived of by none of those changes and chances which deprive men of pecuniary possessions, and which, in some cases, make the purse-proud man of yesterday a crawling sycophant to-day. Health, without which life is not worth having, you will hardly fail to secure by early rising, exercise, sobriety, and abstemiousness as to food. Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives; and the length of life ought ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... needing to be represented by a professional agent, naturally the knavish builder was ready at earliest dawn with his agent; but, as regarded my mother's interest, the task of engaging such an agent had been confided to a neighboring clergyman,—"evangelical," of course, and a humble sycophant of Hannah More, but otherwise the most helpless of human beings, baptized or infidel. He contented himself with instructing a young gentleman, aged about fifteen, to take his pony and ride over to a distant cathedral town, which was honored by the abode of a virtuous though ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sycophant, you are very good, sir, very forgiving, indeed!—But come, added the profligate wretch, I hope you will be so good, as to take her to your bosom; and that, by to-morrow morning, you'll bring her to a ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... poet through his whole life was, in the main, such as to excite great admiration in after generations. He was no sycophant in that age of fawning courtiers. He was simple and manly. He was always melancholy and cared little for the vanities of life. Though poor in early life, he cared but little about money. The king gave him a pension of two thousand francs, which at that time was a good income. He was generous ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... the bitter and stinging personalities of his satires. Horace seems to be personal, but is not. Neither is Juvenal; the names he employs are mere allegoric names. Draco is any bloody fellow; Favonius is any sycophant: but Pope ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... very vices they lay contiguous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibler and gross liver; gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband, imprinted "Corsica Boswell," round his hat; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various |
