"Second-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thing second-rate—poor goods, scamped work. But that pleases, and he pleases, and he is well content with that. Well, then, bravo!—But I am not angry. I and that cantata, we are both old fools! I feel a little ashamed, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the materials of beauty, in precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our own more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... serve our brother, and that he or she is willing to give their best for that object. But that is all. I am fearless to confess that I would enroll for a colleague in the clinics, which hold in their hands the lives of my friends, a man who is facile princeps in the art of surgery rather than a second-rate surgeon who can subscribe to the very same intellectual tenets as I ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... innocent to know what girls are made of. Oh yes, you are very welcome to have six of your own, but you might have six dozen without knowing what a girl brought up at a second-rate boarding-school is capable of, or what it is to have had no development of conscience. What shall you do? send ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
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