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More "Boastful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Coeur de Lion, had succeeded in driving John from the continent; and Louis, when forced to take the field against Henry, had pursued his royal brother-in-law from the bridge of Taillebourg to the gates of Bordeaux. Remembering such triumphs, the French, who have in all ages been vain and boastful, were continually vaunting about their prowess, and repeating the story of some Englishman having cut off the tail of Thomas a Becket's horse, and of Englishmen having ever after that outrage been born with tails ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... gratification, "you have had your day, and, blind bat as you are, you were beginning to see it just for a moment, but this fine speech of yours has thrown you off your guard again. You doubtless think that with a few empty boastful words you have recovered your lost position, but you are mistaken, my good friend, as you will find out when you return from your next cruise—if indeed you ever return at all. Well, enjoy your own opinion while you can; ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... after Law's entry into Paris, and the first time for more than two long years that he found himself alone with the Lady Catharine Knollys. His eagerness might have excused his impetuous and boastful speech. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... youthful Joukahainen Uttered words of boastful triumph: "Now thou ancient Vainamoinen, Never while thy life endureth, In the course of all thy lifetime, While the golden moon is shining, 200 Walk in Vainola's fair meadows. Or on ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... Frank said. "I am sure I never wish to hear the thing mentioned again. I have taken a lot of pains to become a good shot, and it seems that I have a natural aptitude that way. There is nothing more to feel boastful about than if nature had made me a giant, and I had thereby been able to thrash a man of ordinary strength. I am very glad that I have put it out of Marshall's power to bully other men, and, as he had several times done, to force them into duels, ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... hastening homeward after a perilous adventure with the snaky-haired Gorgons. Filled with pity at the story of Andromeda, he waited for the dragon, met and slew him, and set the maiden free. As for the boastful queen, the gods forgave her, and at her death she was set among the stars. That ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... and made such gasconading boasts of his exploits in the battle, that most men thought the rescue of Charles was as ideal as the rest of his tale; and it was on this occasion he acquired the title of Le Glorieux (or the boastful), by which he was ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... self-conceit. Self-conceit is ridiculous; conceit is offensive. Self-respect is a thoroughly worthy feeling; self-esteem is a more generous estimate of one's own character and abilities than the rest of the world are ready to allow. Vainglory is more pompous and boastful than vanity. Compare ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... said the man who had driven the car, in a loud, boastful voice. "My father, Evans Masterson, owns the Boston Moon, the evening paper. If I can telephone to him he will soon get us out of ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... misinterpreted his Mongolian title Ung-Khan as denoting a priest-king named John, and it was this distant Eastern potentate who came to be known in Europe as Presbyter Johannes or Prester John. It was the Syrian Christians who, in their desire to outvie the boastful arrogance of their Latin neighbours, together with many apochryphal tales invented a letter from this dignitary to some of the sovereigns of Europe, including the Pope. Equally fabulous seems to have been the report to Alexander III of a physician named Philip, that this shadowy personage desired ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... him cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him. They gathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in their cheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story after another. They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artful questions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deluded joy ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... acquaintance with Savoy and its count, Philip, his aged great-uncle. Crossing the Mont Cenis, he was welcomed by bands of English magnates who had gone forth to meet him. He was soon at the head of a little army, and in the true spirit of a hero of romance halted to receive the challenge of the boastful Count of Chalon. The tournament between the best knights of England and Burgundy was fought out with such desperation that it became a serious battle. At last Edward unhorsed the count in a personal encounter, which added greatly to his fame. This "Little Battle ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... those two other cronies of Nick's were holding their breath with dismay. They had never expected to see the time when any one could knock their boastful leader out in this easy fashion. What previous opinions they had entertained concerning Hugh Morgan's prowess must now ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... boastful old thing, and even misfortune could not humble her. I was so annoyed that I felt coldly even toward Antonia and listened unsympathetically when she told me her father ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... monuments erected to commemorate battles which had subjected their own countries to the iron rule of conquest. They stood by columns on which the history of their defeat was cast from their captured cannon, and by arches whose friezes told a boastful tale of their subjugation. They passed over bridges whose names reminded them of fields which had witnessed their headlong rout. They strolled through galleries where the masterpieces of art hung as memorials that their political existence had been dependent on the will of a victorious foe. Attempts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... and loved everything sensational. Gemma took some knitting from her basket and listened silently, with busy fingers and downcast eyes. Martini frowned and fidgeted. The manner in which the anecdotes were told seemed to him boastful and self-conscious; and, notwithstanding his unwilling admiration for a man who could endure physical pain with the amazing fortitude which he had seen the week before, he genuinely disliked the Gadfly and all his works ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Would this inoculate his playing, keep the soul out of it? Or worse, would it cause him to strike wrong notes, and even to forget whole passages, so that his guests, and of course Barbara, would go away in the impression that they had heard a boastful person make an ass of himself? He was almost minded to begin his concert with an imitation of a virtuoso suffering from stage fright. If there was going to be laughter, let it be thought that he was not the irresponsible ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... make a boy respected by his younger brothers, and admired by his still younger sisters. They of course have a good deal to tell him. The setter puppies must be inspected. A match is being got up with the village eleven, who are boastful and confident in the possession of a bowling curate. To this the family hero rejoins that "he will crump the parson," a threat not so awful as it sounds. There is a wasps' nest which has been carefully ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... also decivilization by erosion, and while it's going on, nobody notices it. Everybody is proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. But trade is falling off; fewer ships come in each year. So there is boastful talk about planetary self-sufficiency; who needs off-planet trade anyhow? Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always broke. Deficit spending—and always the vital social services for which the government ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... the command of Major Grant, a conceited, overbearing officer, who was as ignorant of Indian tactics as a baby. Besides, his extreme self-confidence made him boastful and reckless, as he subsequently found to his sorrow and shame. One of Washington's biographers says ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... who talk so loudly about the island race and the command of the sea have had such a day? I say to you all it does not make one boastful, but fills one with humility and right vision. Go out some day and run before it in a gale. You will talk less and think more; I dislike the memory of your faces. I have written for your correction. Read ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... is the observance of a due mean, in the matter of Boastfulness. The boastful lay claim to what they do not possess; false modesty [Greek: eironeia] is denying or underrating one's own merits. The balance of the two is the straightforward and truthful character; asserting just ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... been the "vanity" of Hakem which induced him to introduce a new religion. The curious point in the new faith is that Hamza, the son of Ali, the real founder of the Unitarian religion, (such is its boastful title,) was content to take a secondary part. While Hakem was God, the one Supreme, the Imam Hamza was his Intelligence. It was not in his "divine character" that Hakem "hated the Jews and Christians," but in that of a Mahometan bigot, which he displayed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... manner so sheepish, that "if a lamb had roared it couldn't have been more surprising," saying to Little Dombey with startling suddenness, "How are you?"—every time the Reader opened his lips, as speaking in that character, there was a burst of merriment. His boastful account always called forth laughter—that his tailor was Burgess and Co., "fash'nable, but very dear." As also did his constantly reiterated inquiries of Paul—always as an entirely new idea—"I say—it's not of the slightest consequence, you know, but I should wish to mention it—how ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... branches, and the Upanishads, and the Puranas also; who is endued with devotion to his preceptors and with intellect possessed of the eight attributes, who by his abstinence, ability, origin and age, is alone capable of protecting the celestial regions like Mahavat himself; who is never boastful; who showeth proper respect to all; who beholdeth the minutest things as clearly as if those were gross and large; who is sweet-speeched; who showereth diverse kinds of food and drink on his friends and dependents; who is truthful, worshipped ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... have been the position of this man in point of talent, he failed utterly to command respect; and I chiefly remember his coarse, overbearing tone of boastful superiority, and his abusive language to the compositors who set up his MSS. That they found the latter difficult of deciphering is not surprising, since the sheet looked less like human calligraphy than a row of bayonets. McCulloch had edited the 'Scotsman' with decided ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tender little smile, as she quietly made this announcement. There was no hint of boastful pride in her tones; nothing save becoming modesty and ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... suspected of a murder and tried for his life? And then he thought of him who had been murdered, of Mr. Bonteen, his enemy. Was he really gone,—the man who the other day was to have been Chancellor of the Exchequer,—the scornful, arrogant, loud, boastful man? He had hardly thought of Mr. Bonteen before, during these weeks of his own incarceration. He had heard all the details of the murder with a fulness that had been at last complete. The man who had oppressed him, and whom he had at times almost envied, was indeed gone, and ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... are watching the Bandarlog at play in the forest. As you behold them and comprehend their natures, now hugely brave and boastful, now full of dread, the most weakly emotional of any intelligent species, ever trying to attract the notice of some greater animal, not happy indeed unless noticed,—is it not plain they are bound to invent things called gods? Don't think ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... will not conceal from ourselves that these victories for which our bells ring and our flags wave, and for which we thank our God, may become a danger to us, should they make us vain and arrogant, boastful and indolent! God forbid! We will hold fast to our old modesty, with which we have so often been reproached, and which has indeed often enough degenerated into the undervaluing of ourselves and overvaluing of that which is foreign and ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... by thine own soul! Art thou not Rustum? speak! art thou not he?" But Rustum eyed askance the kneeling youth, And turn'd away, and spake to his own soul:— "Ah me, I muse what this young fox may mean! False, wily, boastful, are these Tartar boys. For if I now confess this thing he asks, And hide it not, but say: 'Rustum is here!' He will not yield indeed, nor quit our foes, But he will find some pretext not to fight, And praise my fame, and proffer courteous gifts, A ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... possessions of his ancestors was an empty name; but even a name was now sufficient for the general disaffection to rally round. A pamphlet which was at the time disseminated amongst the people openly called him the heir of Holland; and his engraved portrait, which was publicly exhibited, bore the boastful inscription:— ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... This boastful avowal by James B. Steedman of his own crime in making reports which were false and slanderous to his commanding general must doubtless be accepted as conclusive proof of his own guilt. But a statement by such a witness cannot be regarded as proof that any other officer ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... don't consider you boastful. You're talking the way I heard some youngsters talk when I was a boy. It's refreshing and encouraging to hear you talk that way. Do you know, boy, when we older fellows sometimes get to thinking of the country's past glories, we wonder whether the boys of to-day are going to make ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... such a scene I should love to dwell, and there end my days. Nor was I alone in these transports of delight. All my fellow-travellers seemed equally affected: and from the native Palmyrenes, of whom there were many among us, the most impassioned and boastful exclamations broke forth. 'What is Rome to this?' they cried: 'Fortune is not constant. Why may not Palmyra be what Rome has been—mistress of the world? Who more fit to rule than the great Zenobia? A few years may see great changes. Who can tell what shall come to pass?' These, and ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Master George, without heeding his friend's state of abstraction, "shows, with great liveliness of colouring, how our Scotch pride and poverty make liars and braggarts of us; and yet the knave, whose every third word to an Englishman is a boastful lie, will, I warrant you, be a true and tender friend and follower to his master, and has perhaps parted with his mantle to him in the cold blast, although he himself walked in cuerpo, as the Don says.—Strange! that courage and fidelity—for ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the beautiful temple once hallowed by a Saviour's feet and then drew a ploughshare over Zion that it might become a ploughed field as foretold? The Rome that sculptured on its triumphal arches the figures of the captive Jews it had led in boastful mockery at the chariot ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... exiling of another, and in the end the irrevocable rejection of the theory and practice of absolutist divine- right monarchy, and this at the very time when Louis XIV was holding majestic court at Versailles and all the lesser princes on the Continent were zealously patterning their proud words and boastful deeds after the model of the Grand Monarch. In that day a mere parliament was to ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Zealanders in answer to the commander's praise would be, "Thank you. Why not?" as if this were what the New Zealanders expected of themselves. They take much for granted about New Zealand, without being boastful. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... her father talk like this before. She had often heard these oracular hints of some grand event looming mighty in the immediate future; but she had never seen the vague prophecy accomplished. Always a schemer, and always alternating between the boastful confidence of hope and the peevish bewailings of despair, the Captain had built his castle to-day to sit among its ruins to-morrow, ever ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... phrases. But in the beginning my admiration was spent on more concrete embodiments of the splendors of America; such as fine houses, gay shops, electric engines and apparatus, public buildings, illuminations, and parades. My early letters to my Russian friends were filled with boastful descriptions of these glories of my new country. No native citizen of Chelsea took such pride and delight in its institutions as I did. It required no fife and drum corps, no Fourth of July procession, to set me tingling with patriotism. Even the common agents and instruments of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. 150 Boastful and rough, your first son is a squire; The next a tradesman, meek, and much a liar; Tom struts a soldier, open, bold, and brave; Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave: Is he a Churchman? then he's fond of power: A Quaker? sly: A Presbyterian? sour: A smart free-thinker? ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... him, making faces. It gave me a queer feeling to see a grown-up man indulging in the tactics of a spoiled child, but I have heard many people express the opinion, in which I now heartily agree, that the Germans are a childish sort of people. They are stupidly boastful, inordinately fond of adulation and attention, and peevish and sulky when they cannot have their own way. I tried to imagine how a young German boy would have been treated by one of our doctors, and laughed to myself at the absurdity ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... cavalry reached Tallahassee, they separated into sections, each division taking a different part of the town. Negroes of the household were called together and were informed of their freedom. It is remembered by Willis that the slaves were jubilant but not boastful. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... suffered very much from lack of food and water, and many died of famine. The boastful remark of Magellan was recalled when the sailors did really begin to eat the leather from the ship's yards, first ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... Women liked that sort of thing. It aroused at once their emulation and their condemnation of each other. He seized the opportunity, but—for some reason, he knew not why—awkwardly and clumsily, with a simulated pathos that was lachrymose, a self-assertion that was boastful, and a dramatic manner that was unreal. Suddenly the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... syl.), a boastful, cowardly follower of Bertram, count of Rousillon. His utterances are racy enough, but our contempt for the man smothers our mirth, and we cannot laugh. In one scene the bully is taken blindfolded among his old acquaintances, whom he is led to suppose are his enemies, and he villifies[TN-64] ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... vision with thy clarion shrill, Fell chanticleer; who oft hath reft away My fancied good, and brought substantial ill! Oh, to thy cursed scream, discordant still, Let harmony aye shut her gentle ear: Thy boastful mirth let jealous rivals spill, Insult thy crest, and glossy pinions tear, And ever in thy ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... most useful discipline of thought. They have given its tone and its strength to the intellect of Scotland. They teach it to face all difficulties manfully, and to turn with equal manliness from vain and presumptuous speculations, which, under a boastful show of profundity, conceal invariably an arrant dogmatism. We turn with hearty satisfaction from the tissue of false subtleties which the German professor lays before his youth, to the careful and modest analysis ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... gasping, and fearing that I had been too boastful for politeness, I hastened to inform him that "although the balloon was very big, it was also bu'sted, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... new uniforms and rifles and common and lots of nice crisp Bolshevik money and with boastful stories of how they had whipped the invading foreigners on other fields in the fall and with invective against the invaders these leaders soon excited quite a large following of fighting men from the numerous villages. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... she is bound by heavy promises to her people, and she cannot deliver the goods. She is tied to the stake, and must fight the course. Emaciated, exhausted, repeating, as if in a bad dream, the old boastful appeals to military glory, she must go on till she drops, and then at ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... lively, but not very serious. The two rivals rise up against one another, biting at one another's heads—these solid, fang-proof helmets—roll each other over, pick themselves up, and separate. The vanquished Cricket scuttles off as fast as he can; the victor insults him by a couple of triumphant and boastful chirps; then, moderating his tone, he tacks and veers about the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... slums across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and to see what our public school teachers are making of these children—the backward, the underfed, the "incorrigible," the blind, the anaemic—well, all I can say is, I do not recommend these visits to Americans of the stripe of that boastful citizen who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with a "There, you haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully replied, "Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame thing out!" For myself I never feel quite ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... related the scene of the struggle; but just what Paul had concealed, from shame—the quarrel with Douglas, and the setting-on of the dog—he dwelt on before the strangers with boastful loquacity. ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... lordships were humbly of opinion that the said petition ought to be dismissed." Moreover, the sympathy which Franklin met with from some of the leading members of the opposition, tended still further to embitter the passions which had been roused in the mind of the philosopher. That boastful patriot himself—the great Earl of Chatham—hastened to express his sympathy with Franklin, and his detestation of the treatment he had received from Wedderburne and the government. It is due to the character of Chatham, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... powers of intellect and will would have been necessary to arouse and to arm a people far less disposed to fight for liberty than the French were in 1793. One man alone, General Mina, checked and overthrew the rebel leaders of the north with an activity superior to their own. The Government, boastful and violent in its measures, effected scarcely anything in the organisation of a national force, or in preparing the means of resistance against those foreign armies with whose attack the country ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Apes With laughter wild and gay; They tried to catch that boastful one, But he always got away. So they yelled at him in chorus, Which he minded not a whit; And they pelted him with cocoanuts, Which didn't seem to hit. And then they gave him reasons Which they thought of much avail, To prove how his preposterous ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... blames my imprudence, but I know my brother; I know that when he is angry he is capable of any act of violence, and it is not impossible that at the moment when he felt himself defeated he could have killed me; but I know too, that when his fierce passion has cooled, he will forget my boastful deed, and only try to excel me by others of the same kind. A year ago he was by far the best marksman in Persia, and would be so still, if drink and epilepsy had not undermined his strength. I must confess I feel as if I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... turned your head, your eyes have been dazzled by the gilding of your spurs, and you have fancied yourself a man; but in your own county and your own family, airs are not to be borne. We rate you at what you are worth, and are not to be imposed on by idle tales which the boastful young men of the Prince's court frame of each other. Give up these pretensions, depart in peace to your fellows at Bordeaux, and we will ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... god of poetic inspiration confused with the sixth century poet of the same name, perhaps because this boastful poet identified himself or was identified by other bards with the gods. He speaks of his "splendid chair, inspiration of fluent and urgent song" in Caer Sidi or Elysium, and, speaking in the god's name or identifying himself with him, describes his presence with Llew, Bran, Gwydion, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... bosom of the negro, and that the liberty-loving negro was their legitimate offspring, and not a bastard. The whites should recognize their own doings. On the other hand, the negro should not be over boastful, and should recognize that the lofty conception of the dignity of man and value and true character of liberty were taught him by the Anglo-Saxon. The birds betokened a happy adjustment of all differences; and the dream ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... wishing very much that she hadn't made that silly, boastful dare—trying to make someone else do what she was afraid to try herself! She was very fond of Jerry. The red faded from her face; she clenched her ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... sometimes been presented as a man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary between impracticable French "philosophes" and the ruffians and swindlers that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all "children of liberty," and whose "boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their bright home was in the Settin' Sun." He was nothing of the kind. His judgment was probably unsound on the questions of foreign policy on which as Secretary ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... fight, The eagle hath fled from the dove. [Footnote: Reference is here made to A-tos'sa's dream, as given by AEschylus in his tragedy of The Persians.] Great Jove, that reigns in the starry plains, To the heart of the king hath shown That the boastful parade of his pride was ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... boudoir, and before her mirror began to dress for a dinner to which she had been invited. So it was Cowperwood's money that had been sustaining them all during the last few years; and she had been so liberal with his means—so proud, vain, boastful, superior. And he had only fixed her with those inquiring, examining eyes. Why? But she did not need to ask herself why. She knew now. What a game he had been playing, and what a silly she had been not to see it. Did her mother in any way suspect? She doubted it. This queer, paradoxical, impossible ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... that these people were plotting an uprising for the purpose of overturning the government aroused Governor Alvarado to action. It is probable that the rumors in question were merely the reports of boastful drunken vaporings and would better have been ignored. However, at this time Alvarado, recently arisen to power through the usual revolutionary tactics, felt himself not entirely secure in his new position. He needed ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... struck by this truth—that whosoever possesses Rome is consumed by the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to reconstruct it, make it more splendid, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... pleased. "Our people were making beautiful things in glass two hundred years before Christopher Columbus found his way to your country," he said. He had no wish to seem boastful to these people of a younger nation, so he tried to ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... He gave him a respect and esteem at the start which others accorded only after experience. The Senator was most tactful, too, in his dealings with Mrs. Lincoln, and soon had a firm footing in the household. That he was proud of this, perhaps a little boastful, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... begins. She may need a secretary or a governess—or a—cook. Holy Saint Martin! but I can cook!" And Patsy clasped her hands in an ecstatic appreciation of her culinary art; it was the only one of which she was boastful. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... society. It would capacitate men of moderate abilities to practise the art of healing with real advantage to the public; it would enable every one of literary acquirements to distinguish the genuine disciples of medicine from those of boastful effrontery, or of wily address; and would teach mankind in some important ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... absolute, laughing sort of courage. Cairns divined this—a courage so sure of itself that no boastful explanations were needed. They talked about men, books, their yearnings, the recent fights. Cairns was enthralled and mystified. Bedient did not seem to hope for great things in a worldly way, while the correspondent was driven ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Sugar Camp in peace we dwell And none is boastful of himself; None plots to gain with shot and shell His neighbor's bit of land or pelf. The roar of cannon isn't heard, There stilled is money's tempting voice; Someone detects a new-come bird And at ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... Fleece That, through the night, a star in the storm, shone out. And none thought on return, but one and all, As though the hour that saw the trophy won Should be their last, strained every nerve to win. And so, a valorous band, we sailed away, Boastful and thirsting deep for daring deeds, O'er sea and land, through storm and night and rocks, Death at our heels, Death beckoning us before. And what at other times we had thought full Of terror, now seemed gentle, mild, and good; For Nature was more awful ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... speaking in a boastful manner. He was a noted diver, and had won prizes and medals in many meets for his skill. And, when everything was arranged, he did all the standard dives from the spring-board at the end of the dock, and three members of ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake - Bessie King in Summer Camp • Jane L. Stewart
... time the accused could not testify. So the complainant had it all his own way. The only opportunity Mr. Lincoln had to help his client was to break down the accuser on a cross-examination. Mr. Lincoln said he saw that the accuser was a boastful and bumptious man, and so asked him: 'How much ground was there over which you and my client fought?' The witness answered proudly: 'Six acres, Mr. Lincoln.' 'Well,' said Lincoln, 'don't you think this ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... thou speakest well and like a true man!" he said joyously. "Unfamous as thou art, thou deservest honor for the frank confession of thy lack of merit! Believe me, there are some boastful rhymers in Al-Kyris who would benefit much by a share of thy becoming modesty! Give him his wish, Gisenya—" and Gisenya, obediently detaching a sprig of myrtle from the wreath Sah-luma had worn all day, handed it to Theos ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the voice, and he was standing, in considerable perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young man opened his painted glass door. It was a hot afternoon, and Lapham was in his shirt sleeves. Scarcely a trace of the boastful hospitality with which he had welcomed Corey to his house a few days before lingered in his present address. He looked at the young man's face, as if he expected him to despatch whatever unimaginable affair he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... life offers so fair and pleasant a record. One observation, however, we feel called upon to make to the entertaining Major: the youth of America should be taught to love, to live for, and, if need be, to die for their country; but they should also be taught to shun narrow exclusiveness and boastful vanity. A government of a whole people should in this respect set a noble example to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is in accord with Eskimo ethics. They say that if they adopt a boastful air and fail to give as many presents as the other n['ae]skut they will be ashamed. So ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... eyes she was a sight that weakened the knees beneath him and set him quaking with a new fear. He dared not speak and bring her gaze upon him, the memory of his boastful words in the forest ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Hamlet's that precedes the soliloquy, and is more than one line in length—the speech beginning 'Seems, madam! nay, it is'—he will understand what, surely, when first we come to it, sounds very strange and almost boastful. It is not, in effect, about Hamlet himself at all; it is about his mother (I do not mean that it is intentionally and consciously so; and still less that she understood ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Montrevel listened to Edouard's slightly boastful account of his prowess. Then she looked at him with that deep and holy sorrow of mothers to whom fame is no compensation for the blood it sheds. Oh! ungrateful indeed is the child who has seen that look bent upon him and does not eternally remember it. Then, after a few seconds of this painful ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... conscious and supercilious patronage of the wilder products of American life and literature. I heard exaggerated stories about Americans, and especially about the Americans of the Far West,—heard them, that is, represented as semi-barbarians, coarse, rash, and boastful, with bad manners and no feeling for the reticences of life. Such legends exasperated me beyond words. I felt as did the author of Ionica on re-reading the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Valles was one of the most conspicuous among the men of the 18th of March. He had been journalist, working printer, a clerk at the Hotel de Ville, editor of a newspaper, pamphleteer, and cafe orator in turn, but always noisy and boastful. Andre Gill, the caricaturist, once drew him as an undertaker's dog, dragging a saucepan behind him, and the caricature told Valles' story well enough. In face he was ugly, but energetic in ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... gained at Aspern half a victory; and the fact that the Austrians had not been beaten—that Napoleon had been compelled to fall back with his army and to take refuge on the island of Lobau, was regarded as a victory, which was announced in the most boastful manner. But if it was a victory, the Austrians did not know how to profit by it. Instead of uniting their forces and attacking Lobau, where the French army was encamped, huddled together, and exhausted by the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... military trains. It had been the intention of the War Office to pack us under guard with the herds on one of those Government refugee trains. But to live and sleep with the soldiers as we were now to do, to see their marches, to absorb their uninformed and boastful talk, to study their guns, munitions, and equipment, was better than our ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... informed his friends and neighbours, who had been absent from that performance, that they had missed very much indeed, and had by no means seen Thespis at his best. Even nowadays, middle-aged playgoers, old enough to remember the late Mr. Macready, are trumped, as it were, by older playgoers, boastful of their memories of Kemble and the elder Kean. And these players, in their day and in their turn, underwent disparagement at the hands of veterans who had seen Garrick. Pope, much as he admired Garrick, yet ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... Orpheus, take that silver—take it all, I have no more—go early to market and buy flowers—laurel branches, ivy, violets and roses. But no lotuses though the market here is full of them; they are showy, boastful things with no scent, I cannot bear them. We will go crowned to the Temple ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the good citizens of a good town, parading, hustling, loafing—sturdy patricians, wretched plebeians, stern centurios, boastful soldiers, scheming politicians, crafty law-clerks, timid scribes, chattering barbers, bullying gladiators, haughty actors, dusty travelers, making for Albinus', the famous host at the Via della Abbondanza or, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... yourself, don't you!" he sneered. He was just drunk enough to be boastful, while thoroughly sure of what he was saying. "You expect to tell a fine tale! I know the psychology of the English! I know it like a book! Let me tell you two things: First, your English would not believe you. They are such supremely cocksure fools that they can not be made ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was directly after breakfast, and Thomas, who was putting a new tooth in the "loafer rake," had set a fine, mellow "wine-sap," from which he had taken a bite, on the shed sill beside him. "Got a pile of those fellows in my hoard," he remarked, with a boastful wink. "Have you got a hoard down at ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... a great flourish about his fidelity to Massachusetts. I shall make no profession of zeal for the interests and honor of South Carolina; of that my constituents shall judge. If there be one State in the Union, Mr. President (and I say it not in a boastful spirit), that may challenge comparison with any other for a uniform, zealous, ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union, that State is South Carolina. Sir, from the very commencement of the Revolution up to this hour ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... with the cleek, that he gets equal or superior results with other clubs, and that therefore he has abandoned it to permanent seclusion in the locker, you may shake your head at him, for he is only deceiving himself. Like the wares of boastful advertisers, there is no other which is "just as good," and if a golfer finds that he can do no business with his cleek, the sooner he learns to do it the better will it ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... things that I really need to know," was the mildly boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr. Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man; and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... steadily and strongly for good citizenship. But he never talks boastful Americanism. He seldom speaks in so many words of either Americanism or good citizenship, but he constantly and silently keeps the American flag, as the symbol of good citizenship, before his people. An American ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... the most nerve-racking excitement. The life of the school is reflected in the life of the community, and the throbs of excitement that vibrate from the school are felt in every home of the section. We are in the thick of preparations for a deadly contest with the insolent, benighted, boastful, but hitherto triumphant Front, in the matter of shinny. You know my antipathy to violent sports, and you will find some difficulty in picturing me an enthusiastic trainer and general director of the Twentieth team, flying about, wildly gesticulating with a club, and shrieking orders, imprecations, ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... diversion of the island, having entirely supplanted the national spectacle of bull-baiting. Cuba, in fact, seemed to me a great poultry-yard. I heard the crowing of cocks in all quarters, for the game-cock is the noisiest and most boastful of birds, and is perpetually uttering his notes of defiance. In the villages I saw the veterans of the pit, a strong-legged race, with their combs cropped smooth to the head, the feathers plucked from every part of the body except their wings, and the tail docked like that of a coach horse, ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... heathen times—great in all countries—great even under heathen sentiments—is indescribably monstrous in Christian days, and exercised as it is, not unfrequently, over Christian people. [Hear!] It is surely remarkable, and exceedingly disgraceful to a century and a generation so boastful of its progress, and of the institution of so many Bible societies, with so many professions and preachments of Christianity—with so many declarations of the spiritual value of man before God—after so many declarations of this equality of every man in the sight of his fellow-man—that we should ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... and carried John Lawrence ahead of many of his seniors; but it was promotion that was fully justified by events. He was not wanting in self-confidence, and the tone of some of his letters to the Secretary at head-quarters might seem boastful, had not his whole career shown that he could more than make good his promise. 'So far as I am concerned as supervisor,' he says, 'I could easily manage double the extent of country'; and then, comparing ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... bustle and excitement. Every one turned out to see us off. Breaking an empty sauce-bottle over the bow of our sledge, we christened it the M.H.S. Championship (Man-Hauled Sledge). The name was no boastful prevision of mighty deeds, as, at the Hut, a "Championship" was understood to mean some careless action usually occasioning damage to property, while our party included ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... pass which would have been most honourable to him and to them, if there were not abundant proofs that it was meant to be a dead letter. It was an Act purporting to grant entire liberty of conscience to all Christian sects. On this occasion a proclamation was put forth announcing in boastful language to the English people that their rightful King had now signally refuted those slanderers who had accused him of affecting zeal for religious liberty merely in order to serve a turn. If he were ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to Berlin, I had been frequently warned by Germans, natives of other states, of the boastful and deceptive character of the Prussians. Such was the general opinion expressed; and although I never found them deceptive, the epithet of boastful seemed only too truthfully bestowed. A Prussian is naturally a swaggerer; but then, unfortunately for other Germans, who are ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... divisions; to wit: Mane "Motherlike," Mane "Fatherlike," and Mane "All-comprehending", [3]'twas he that possessed the form of his mother and of his father and the dignity of them both;[3] Mane "Mildly-submissive," and Mane "Greatly-submissive," Mane "Boastful" [4]and Mane ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... with my weapons for the last two years; and deem me not boastful when I say that my instructor, Duncan Macleod of Lanark, who is a famous swordsman, says that I could hold my own and more against any ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion" [that strong paw which can knock a man down], "and out of the paw of the bear, He will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine;" and, strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, he went to meet the boastful giant of whom ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... can "tell a tale such as will please." For myself, out of a goodly store, I should select for first honours a repartee, new to me, of Sir HERBERT TREE (forgive this dropping into rhyme!). It tells of a boastful old-time actor, vaunting his triumphs as Hamlet, when "the audience took fifteen minutes leaving the theatre." "Was ha lame?" If our only HERBERT did not in fact make this reply, I can only hope that he will at once hasten home and do so. But while we are upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... man sometimes feels awkwardly, when thus led captive; but the greatest, strongest, and most boastful, often go most obediently under woman-rule; for which, see Shakspeare, concerning Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... appeal to his wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow's age at such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries. She herself was not boastful in her vein, but she never had her fill of caressing the child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that was fortunate in his little existence. No schoolboy could have talked more of the holidays which were just beginning and less ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deafening. At a table upon which were many bottles, one or two of them broken, sat Monsieur Mercier and his comrade Dubois, both in the first stages of intoxication when men are pleased to have secrets and grow boastful. ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... romance, information of this highly imaginative sort is entertaining, but it is not edifying." One would be glad to get at the other side of the Aztec story, which, we suspect, would place the chivalric invaders in a very different light from that of their own boastful records, and also enable us to form a more just and truthful opinion of the aborigines themselves. That their numbers, religious sacrifices, and barbaric excesses are generally overdrawn is perfectly manifest. Every fair-minded student of history frankly ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... dominated the conversation, much more so than on the previous evening, when there had been some little difficulty in extracting any account of his exploits from him. Now he was willing to talk of them, and he talked well, not exactly with modesty, but with no trace of boastful quality, such as would certainly have aroused the prejudices of his listeners ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... The boastful squire was richly adorned for the occasion, having already made friends among the ladies of the court, and wearing favors and jewels received at the hands of some of the fairest there. Nor was his boast an empty one. Not a man who faced him was able to hurl him from the saddle, while ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... elder by a year, was a bit slow and heavy on his pins; given to reading, too, though he seemed to take it up for peace and quietness more than for any show he made of his learning. Bill was smarter altogether and better looking; a bit boastful, after the manner of young chaps. He could read too, but never did much at it, though I've heard that on Saturday nights he was fond of ranting verses—stuff about drink and such like—out of a book of Robert Burns's poetry he'd borrowed ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to those assassins that the Marquis had been neither mad nor boastful when he had spoken of strange things he had learned beyond the Alps, or else it was they themselves were turned light-headed, for the doors of a cupboard at the far end of the room flew open suddenly, and from between them stepped the stalwart ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... the real thunder rolled and the lightning flashed all around his paradise, Hiram lost his boastful courage. He saw visions. Trembling in every limb, he crouched on his throne and imagined he saw angels and demons and fairies dancing round him and jeering at his pretensions and his ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... emblem of the English woman, but now, since the world has grown so wise and made such progress in the art of running rapidly downhill, is even the aristocratic British peer quite easy in his mind regarding his fair peeress? Can he leave her to her own devices with safety? Are there not men, boastful too of their "blue blood," who are perhaps ready to stoop to the thief's trick of entering his house during his absence by means of private keys, and stealing away his wife's affections?—and is not she, though ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... the man suggests the title of his most popular book Outspoken Essays—a somewhat boastful phrase that would, I think, have slightly distressed a critic like Ste.-Beuve—and nothing, except a certain firm emphasis on the word truth, suggests in his conversation the spirit that shows in the more controversial of his essays. On the contrary, he is in manner, bearing, and spirit ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. (2) The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over - ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... it would seem a mark of ill-breeding to expatiate upon their own things. Such a thing is simply not done in this school. The auditorium is a stately, commodious, and beautiful room, and everybody connected with the school accepts it as a matter of course with no boastful comment. Anything approaching braggadocio would prove a discordant note in this school, and, in this respect, it represents the American ideal that is ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... conduct of the man who insinuates himself into the affections of a young girl by every protestation and avowal possible, save that which would be binding upon himself, and then withdraws his attentions with the boastful consciousness that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... surpasses all its rivals. In size, in richness of decoration, in boldness of outline, and in aerial lightness it is unequalled. Above all, it still contains six windows of magnificent stained glass. Even now it seems to justify its boastful inscription: ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... to her brother in prison, to inform him that he must die. At first he was boastful, and promised to hug the darkness of death. But when he clearly understood that his sister could buy his life by marrying Angelo, he felt his life more valuable than her happiness, and he exclaimed, "Sweet ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... immured in that dungeon where you expected her to die, your tool, Sheila Kelly, threw caution to the winds, and betrayed to her in boastful words your agency in her kidnapping. It is not your fault that my wife did not die of the poison you gave her to swallow, but only that the wind and rain revived her when she lay out in the road where you had her placed, believing her dead, with her lips sealed ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... none of the modesty that has been described as "an invention for protection against envy," because unlike that one of his distinguished predecessors who discovered this theory to excuse his own imperfect but boastful egotism, he recognizes no such human failing as envy. Most of the papers in the present collection of the sayings of this great and learned man have appeared in the press of America and England. This will account for the fact that they deal with ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... mind it much myself, for I am very old and have not a great while longer to live in any case, but for the time that is left it will mar my usefulness. I have been able to help the people here and they have come to depend upon me—that is my life. I trust I am not boastful if I say my greatest joy has been in ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... which burst without any warning, like a pair of gigantic hands clapping. Sometimes a few 'Little Willies' would strike Anton's Farm, which was included in our trench line, but no attempt was made to level this valuable ruin, which concealed patient and boastful snipers. The Warwicks on our left expiated the sins of the whole Division, and on most days it was possible to watch with a feeling of complete security a variety of shells bursting among them a few hundred yards away; ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... a dealer. And then usually he was not really a true-born Briton. He waits to see what is being hung. He has these things now because he thinks they are right, not because they are beautiful, just as he used to have the Stag at Bay and the Boastful Hound. It is Leighton now; it was Landseer then. Really I believe that very soon the ladies' papers will devote a column to pictures. Something in this style. 'Smart people are taking down their ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... truth about America as revealed in the initial number of the brave new venture was that America was crude, blatant, boastful, vulgar, and money-grubbing. We were without ideals beyond the dollar; without desires save those to be glutted by material wealth. It was the high aim of the New Dawn—said the associate editor, Merle Dalton Whipple—to ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... to lay hands on his prize, just as though the big greenback might recover, and hop into the pond before his very eyes, that possibly Steve was not quite as careful as his boastful ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... much," went on Olaf. "He was boastful. The Russian pressed him to show this thing. After a while the red one went out and came back with a little golden box. He and the Russian went into the garden. I followed them. There was a lille Hoj—a mound—of stones in that garden on which ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... as to which was the most beautiful. When their strife was at its height, a Bramble from the neighboring hedge lifted up its voice, and said in a boastful tone: "Pray, my dear friends, in my presence at least cease ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... the spectator. He takes as much pains to discover, as the greater artist does to conceal, the marks of his subordinate assiduity. In works of the lower kind everything appears studied and encumbered; it is all boastful art and open affectation. The ignorant often part from such pictures with wonder in their mouths, and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... abundant and longer than that of other peoples. His figure is well proportioned, neat, and generally somewhat boyish. His expression is bright and mobile, his lips and teeth are generally distorted and discoloured by the constant chewing of betel nut. They are a vain, dressy, boastful, excitable, not to say frivolous people — cheerful, talkative, sociable, fond of fun and jokes and lively stories; though given to exaggeration, their statements can generally be accepted as founded on fact; they are industrious and energetic, and are great wanderers; ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... crossed the Pyrenees they met with but slight opposition and soon succeeded in making themselves masters of Southern France, thereby furthering and encouraging their boastful ambition to conquer ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... years ago, one of the Lords of the English Admiralty had predicted that in the first naval battle fought between Germany and England, the German fleet would be entirely annihilated. We naturally only smiled in derision at these boastful words. The English newspapers, besides, had for many years announced that whenever German officers met together they drank a toast "To the Day." Although of course this was untrue, yet we were all burning to prove in battle what our great Navy had ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... seize him by the throat, and strangle him on the spot. But why should he make a scene with such a man, and thus drag Loo Loo's name into painful notoriety? The old rou was evidently trying to foment a quarrel with him. Thoroughly animal in every department of his nature, he was boastful of brute courage, and prided himself upon having killed several men in duels. Alfred conjectured his line of policy, and resolved to frustrate it. He therefore coolly replied, "I have seen such slippers; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... received, even at that time, but little support from irregular and militia forces in the open field. Washington's opinions on this subject furnish so striking a contrast to the congressional speeches of modern political demagogues, who, with boastful swaggers, would fain persuade us that we require no organization or discipline to meet the veteran troops of Europe in the open field, and who would hurry us, without preparation, into war with the strongest military powers of the world—so striking is the contrast between the assertions ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... rifles and common and lots of nice crisp Bolshevik money and with boastful stories of how they had whipped the invading foreigners on other fields in the fall and with invective against the invaders these leaders soon excited quite a large following of fighting men from the numerous villages. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... all the company were either asleep or so full of strong drink that they could not listen, so in the end he made no vow whatsoever. Yet to the last he was as sober as when he first entered the hall, and he remembered ever afterwards the boastful oaths that had been made. Many of his fellow vikings—as Thorkel the High, Bui the Thick, and Vagn Akison — declared that they would but follow their chief to Norway, while others of Sweyn's following in like manner ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... whittled down, the area much reduced, and the site and foundations of the new buildings were handed over to the Ville. What the Allies failed to do in 1814 the Commune succeeded in doing in 1871, and the boastful Column of Vendome, a pitiful plagiarism of Trajan's Column at Rome, was laid in the dust, only however to be raised again by the Third Republic in 1875. We enter the Tuileries Gardens crossing the Terrace of the Feuillants, all that is left of the famous monastery and grounds where Lafayette's ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... insolently from the printed page. The gathering broke up in quick confusion on finding him a silent auditor. When they were gone he reached for the newspaper. A record-breaking launching was to be achieved at Hilmer's shipyard within the week. The article ended with a boastful fling from Hilmer to the effect that his plant was running to full capacity in spite of strikes and lockouts. Fred threw the paper to the floor. A chill enveloped him. He had caught only the merest fragments of conversation which had fallen from the lips of the group he had surprised, but his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... by means of education the public may come to desire the planting of nut trees along the highways and in other public places to the extent that it will submit to taxation for the purpose. The public planting of nut trees belongs to progress. If we are to remain boastful of progress in this country the question will gradually be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... too sad to think long about, lest we become very Heraclituses. Let us take the other side of the matter with Democritus, try to laugh man out of a little of his boastful ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell him, that if the House of Commons would but summon one of the little Paramecia from any Thames' sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before their next Cholera Committee, sanitary blue-books, invaluable as they are, would ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... more concrete embodiments of the splendors of America; such as fine houses, gay shops, electric engines and apparatus, public buildings, illuminations, and parades. My early letters to my Russian friends were filled with boastful descriptions of these glories of my new country. No native citizen of Chelsea took such pride and delight in its institutions as I did. It required no fife and drum corps, no Fourth of July procession, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... the assurance that you have not lived in vain. For more than that homes shall be peaceful, more than that hearts shall be happy, is it that religion shall be free. But one thing let us remember: strong hearts are not boastful; not in our own might do we go forth to this battle. 'Christo duec,'—'with Christ for our leader,'—this is our courage. Our flag, whose motto ends with this, may well begin, 'Nil desperandum—'Never despair.' We never have despaired; we have known only hope, and now hope is ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... back, is strong; but he is not strong enough for this purpose. He is bold. He shrinks from nothing. Like Danton, he may cry, "l'audace! l'audace! toujours l'au-dace!" but even his audacity cannot compass this work. The Senator copies the British officer who, with boastful swagger, said that with the hilt of his sword he would cram the "stamps" down the throats of the American people, and he will meet a similar failure. He may convulse this country with a civil feud. Like the ancient madman, he may set fire to this Temple of Constitutional Liberty, grander than ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... real there are the good citizens of a good town, parading, hustling, loafing—sturdy patricians, wretched plebeians, stern centurios, boastful soldiers, scheming politicians, crafty law-clerks, timid scribes, chattering barbers, bullying gladiators, haughty actors, dusty travelers, making for Albinus', the famous host at the Via della Abbondanza or, would he give ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... declared war against Greece, all his courtiers encouraged his boastful temper, which forgot how unsubstantial his grounds for confidence were. One declared that the Greeks would not endure to hear the news of the declaration of war, and would take to flight at the first rumour of his approach; another, that with such a vast army ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... exerting myself exceedingly to accomplish this purpose. Undoubtedly this must have made me a very undesirable person to contend with in a fight. Luckily for me, I have never been afflicted with a quarrelsome or vindictive mind. This is not a boastful or frivolous assertion, but is uttered in the spirit of thankfulness to the allwise Creator ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... the sailor with the Cornish patronymic and Devonian birthplace, found an excellent boon companion in the little sallow-faced fellow who had overtaken him a few miles south of Gloucester. And he found the "New Inn," boastful of having given a night's lodging to the Queen and the Earl of Leicester, an expensive but comfortable tavern. Its dimensions were goodly, its position a sheltered one, its kitchens ample and well-managed, and ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... connection with one of those feud cases, I was asked by a private if I were related to Edgar Allan Poe, "De mug what used to write poetry," and when I replied, "Yes, he was my grandmother's first cousin," he, evidently thinking I was too boastful, remarked, "Well, man, ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... in your power,' said I, and she struck out. Her shape is exceedingly graceful; I was charmed by the occasional tightening in of her lips as she exerted her muscle, while at intervals telling me of her race with one of her boastful younger brothers, whom she had beaten. I believe it is only when they are using physical exertion that the eyes of young girls have entire simplicity—the simplicity of nature as opposed to that other artificial simplicity which they learn ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to Massachusetts. I shall make no profession of zeal for the interests and honor of South Carolina; of that my constituents shall judge. If there be one State in the Union, Mr. President (and I say it not in a boastful spirit), that may challenge comparison with any other for a uniform, zealous, ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union, that State is South Carolina. Sir, from the very commencement of the Revolution up to this hour there is no sacrifice, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... whistle for us to get out of their way. If I may do so, without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the other craft on the river ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... how he said to King Saul, "The Lord hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion" [that strong paw which can knock a man down], "and out of the paw of the bear, He will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine;" and, strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, he went to meet the boastful giant of ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... confidence in himself, real or assumed, was unlimited. Several of the officers who had seen no service in the field, were talking it over one evening in the colonel's tent, and conjecturing how they would feel and act when under fire. Most of them were in anything but a boastful mood, contenting themselves with modestly expressing the belief that when the ordeal came and they were put to the proof, they would stand up to the work and do their duty like officers and gentlemen. Captain Pratt said little, but, as we were walking away after the conference had ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... dealer makes up in boastful clamour for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt buttons and a paper of hair pins, is much worse than the Anvil ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... particularly gratifying to the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were enabled to make a long-desired trip into the virgin East, where miners had not yet appeared. It was brought about by a conversation in the Eldorado Saloon, in which men waxed boastful of their favorite dogs. Buck, because of his record, was the target for these men, and Thornton was driven stoutly to defend him. At the end of half an hour one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... and still the Macdonalds of Glencoe had not come in. The punctilious pride of Mac Ian was doubtless gratified by the thought that he had continued to defy the government after the boastful Glengarry, the ferocious Keppoch, the magnanimous Lochiel had yielded: but he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the endurance to overcome the disappointments that may come to me. May I not be neglectful of the great opportunities of which I am privileged to take advantage. May I not be pretentious of what I have not done, or boastful of what I am, but with my best ability live ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... feeling to see a grown-up man indulging in the tactics of a spoiled child, but I have heard many people express the opinion, in which I now heartily agree, that the Germans are a childish sort of people. They are stupidly boastful, inordinately fond of adulation and attention, and peevish and sulky when they cannot have their own way. I tried to imagine how a young German boy would have been treated by one of our doctors, and laughed to myself at the absurdity of the thought that they would ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... that!"—the like of that being their stupidity in living in an exposed situation. Millreagh does not admit that it has suffered any more than a temporary diminishment of its greatness, and it makes optimistic and boastful prophecies of the fortune and repute that will come to it when the engineers make a tunnel between Scotland and Ireland. Sometimes an article on the Channel Tunnel will appear in the Newsletter or the Whig, and for weeks afterwards Millreagh lives ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... she was a sight that weakened the knees beneath him and set him quaking with a new fear. He dared not speak and bring her gaze upon him, the memory of his boastful words in the ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... way This foolish tale he told, That his daughter could spin from bits of straw Continuous threads of gold! So boastful had he grown, forsooth, That he cared but little for the truth: But since this was a curious thing It came to the knowledge ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... When circumstances condemn such generous souls as Father Hecker to inactivity, a favorite solace is picking up fragments of work or recalling high ideas from the crowded memory of their former zeal, often with much profit to those who listen. And this was no idle-minded or boastful trait in him, as we ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the man before this in the village, and detested him on sight; there was something indescribably raffish in his looks and ways that raised my gorge; and when man-eating was referred to, and he laughed a low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful, like one reminded of some dashing peccadillo, my repugnance was mingled with nausea. This is no very human attitude, nor one at all becoming in a traveller. And, seen more privately, the man improved. Something negroid ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... noble and affectionate praises and appreciations of our old boastful big Standard-Bearer, now gone silent forever, his real and imaginary battles all fought, his work done, his life honorably closed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and a flute does what it can, but not what it would. Sometimes, instead of a violone, a hoarse trombone, with a violent cold in the head, snorts out the bass impatiently, gets ludicrously uncontrollable and boastful at times, and is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the cadenzas to finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its own noisy vociferation. The harmonic arrangements are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the pen seduced By specious wonders, and too slow to tell Of what the ingenuous, what bewildered men, Beginning to mistrust their boastful guides, 515 And wise men, willing to grow wiser, caught, Rapt auditors! from thy most eloquent tongue— Now mute, for ever mute in the cold grave. I see him,—old, but Vigorous in age,— Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start 520 Out ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... came, misinterpreted his Mongolian title Ung-Khan as denoting a priest-king named John, and it was this distant Eastern potentate who came to be known in Europe as Presbyter Johannes or Prester John. It was the Syrian Christians who, in their desire to outvie the boastful arrogance of their Latin neighbours, together with many apochryphal tales invented a letter from this dignitary to some of the sovereigns of Europe, including the Pope. Equally fabulous seems to have been the report to Alexander III of a physician named Philip, that this shadowy ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... attracts the bee, but when he departs it is to his lips that the honey clings," replied the woman cautiously; for after Yan's boastful words on entering she had a fear lest haply this person might be one on behalf of some guardian of the night whom her son had flung across the street (as he had specifically declared his habitual treatment of them to be) come to take him ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... hand. "You offend me," he said gravely. "I have told you this in good faith and you reward me with disbelief and boastful talk. Your enemies are more powerful than you think, and your own people utterly defenceless ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... Nameless waif, eh? Say, that's the rawest she'd ever stated it. Course I was fixed now to show her where she'd overdone the part; but somehow I couldn't seem to frame up any way of gettin' my fam'ly tree on record without seemin' to do it boastful. Besides, Aunty wouldn't take my word for Uncle Kyrle and all the rest. She'd want ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... this great traveller, "rocks of micaceous slate, and of sparkling talc, which are resplendent in the midst of a sheet of water, which acts as a reflector beneath the burning tropical sun." So are explained those massive domes of gold, those obelisks of silver, and all those marvels of which the boastful and enthusiastic minds of the Spaniards afforded them a glimpse. Did Raleigh believe really in the existence of this city of gold, for the conquest of which he was about to sacrifice so many lives? Was he thoroughly convinced himself, or did he not yield ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... of a foolish paradox which is to the effect that the non-lover ought to be accepted rather than the lover—because he is more rational, more agreeable, more enduring, less suspicious, less hurtful, less boastful, less engrossing, and because there are more of them, and for a great many other reasons which are equally unmeaning. Phaedrus is captivated with the beauty of the periods, and wants to make Socrates say that nothing was or ever could be written better. Socrates does ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Notwithstanding these brave and boastful words, he was in reality very much afraid, having heard of Rasalu's renown. And learning that he was stopping at the house of an old woman in the city, till the hour for playing chaupur arrived, Sarkap sent slaves to him with ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... in vain. Some dubious instances are mentioned, and the dissatisfied inquirer is passed on to the Fors de Bearn, and to Lagreze, and is informed that M. Louis Veuillot raised an unprofitable dust upon the subject. I remember that M. Veuillot, in his boastful scorn for book learning, made no secret that he took up the cause because the Church was attacked, but got his facts from somebody else. Graver men than Veuillot have shared his conclusion. Sir Henry Maine, having looked into the matter in his quick, decisive ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... in a boastful way To his anxious parents told That while he was young he thought he'd play, And he'd learn when he ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... toilsome effort. We shall then find that the secret of co-operation is to have faith in ourselves because we first have faith in God; and we shall discover that this Divine self-confidence is something very different from a boastful egotism which assumes a personal superiority over others. It is simply the assurance of a man who knows that he is working in accordance with a law of nature. He does not claim as a personal achievement what the Law does FOR him: but on the other hand he does not trouble himself about outcries ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... strengthening the position. In front of his lines he dug deep trenches, covered over with green sods, supported by twigs and branches. The pass leading into this plain was lined by 500 kerne, whose Parthian warfare was proverbial. He had reckoned on the headlong and boastful disposition of his opponent, and the result showed his accurate knowledge of character. Bagnal's first division, veterans from Brittany and Flanders, including 600 curassiers in complete armour, armed with lances nine feet ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... mind that the battle ought to have resulted differently, and that if the foes of "the mighty Julius" had had the wit to take advantage of his indiscretion, certain pages of the "Commentaries" might have been conceived in a less boastful spirit. Little Louis Joseph had sketched a rough plan, showing the respective positions of the opposing forces, and had then demanded of his tutor why this had not been done, why that had been neglected, and why the other had never been even so much as thought of. M. Ricot, after ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... head. Andrews looked out of the window, feeling in his nostrils the tingle of steam and coal gas. A phrase out of some translation of the Iliad came to his head: "Ambrosial night, Night ambrosial unending." But better than sitting round a camp fire drinking wine and water and listening to the boastful yarns of long-haired Achaeans, was this hustling through the countryside away from the monotonous whine of past unhappiness, towards ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... "War," in four languages (Russian, French, English and German) with much the same sang-froid as the juggler who tosses knives and, when the meal was done, thanked Heaven that nobody had launched a tactless bomb which might have plunged us into a boiling sea. There was nothing particularly boastful in their conversation, though at times a certain assured reference to "Paris in a fortnight" crept in, which we found difficult to digest—in fact I was furious. Paris, indeed! Beautiful Paris! My neighbor at table on the right was a man ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... time Mr Ross, who considered them only as clever scoundrels or unmitigated humbugs, objected, as he did not wish to seem in any way to encourage them. However, one day as they, from Mr Ross's reluctance to put them to the test, became exceedingly boastful of their powers to do such wonderful things it was decided ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... It is so. I never made much of an Alleluia. It is not in my nature somehow. 'Tis a vain boastful thing an Alleluia. ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... on the Gily, One sweet mornin' long ago, Ten of us was throwed right freely By a hawse from Idaho. And we thought he'd go a-beggin' For a man to break his pride, Till, a-hitchin' up one leggin', Boastful Bill cut loose ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... compulsion, and caused a feeling of dislike to the person honoured, and of absolute hatred against those who enforced them, but showed no gratitude or desire to honour the dead. They were mere displays of barbaric pride and boastful extravagance, which wastes its superfluity on vain and useless objects; whereas, here was a private citizen who died in a foreign land, without his wife, his children or his friends, and, without any one asking for it or compelling them to it, he was escorted to his grave, buried and crowned with ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... I don't consider you boastful. You're talking the way I heard some youngsters talk when I was a boy. It's refreshing and encouraging to hear you talk that way. Do you know, boy, when we older fellows sometimes get to thinking of the country's past glories, we wonder whether the boys of to-day are going to make such ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... be admitted that you were justified in looking upon some of the boastful edicts of Winston Churchill, with reference to the conduct of English merchant vessels, as provocations which gave you legitimate ground for retaliation ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... wife, with his mouth full of beefsteak, as to the little fellow's age at such or such a time when he had said or done something memorable; and I noticed that Madame usually pooh-poohed these inquiries. She herself was not boastful in her vein; but she never had her fill of caressing the child; and she seemed to take a gentle pleasure in recalling all that was fortunate in his little existence. No schoolboy could have talked more of the holidays which were just beginning ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our clothes after our return home, washed the soot and dirt from our hands and faces, and while we were thus employed a modest rap was heard at the door, and who should enter but Mr. Steel Spring, looking as important, defiant, and boastful as ever. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... manner—all his own—such as befits the tyrannical threat.... He is bold. He shrinks from nothing. Like Danton, he may cry, 'l'audace! l'audace! tonjours l'audace!' but even his audacity cannot compass this work. The Senator copies the British officer, who, with boastful swagger, said that with the hilt of his sword he would cram the 'stamps' down the throats of the American people, and he ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the tall, waving grass; strange birds carolled joyously from the orchard by the road, and near at hand the old, brown Jersey lowed lovingly to her ungainly calf. From the more distant chicken coop came the cackle of hens and the boastful ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Cetewayo, who, although he could make war upon his brother to secure the throne, did not think it wise to let it go abroad that the royal blood might be lightly spilt. Also, knowing that I was a witness of the Prince's death, he was well aware that Umbezi was but a boastful liar who hoped thus to ingratiate himself with an ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... Posthumus, Pisanio, are instances of what I mean. All these indeed differ very widely from each other as individuals; but they all have this in common, that their virtues sit easy and natural upon them, as native outgrowths, not as things put on: there is no ambition, no pretension, nothing at all boastful or fictitious or pharisaical or squeamish or egoish in their virtues; we never see the men hanging over them, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially thoughtful and tender of them, and ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and intrigues concocted by him in Berlin, and his efforts to lead my officers into insubordination and revolt. But when I ordered investigations to be made into these matters, and the count should have justified his actions, the boastful lord showed himself to be but a ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... earth. To prove my sympathy as no new feeling, I may refer your kindly curiosity to my Proverbial Chapters on 'The Future of Animals,' to many of my occasional poems, and to the enclosed, which I hope it may please you to accept. You may like to know also, as a kindred spirit (and pray don't think me boastful), that years ago, through a personal communication with Louis Napoleon, I have a happy reason to believe that the undersigned was instrumental in stopping the horrors of Altorf, besides other similar ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... citizens from proper treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the slightest attention ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and at the same time full of wise counsel in dealing with the enemy. As an illustration: he was not cowardly or heedless in waging war against Perseus, but afterward did not assume a pompous or boastful air toward him. (Valesius, p. 613. Zonaras, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... goaded on his servant John Eccius, that notorious adversary of Christ, by the unchecked lust for fame, to drag me unexpectedly into the arena, trying to catch me in one little word concerning the primacy of the Church of Rome, which had fallen from me in passing. That boastful Thraso, foaming and gnashing his teeth, proclaimed that he would dare all things for the glory of God and for the honour of the holy apostolic seat; and, being puffed up respecting your power, which he ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... attempt might admonish the author, at least as effectually as any intimations of ours. Here, however, we have him again, with a Lay of the Laureate, and a Carmen Nuptiale, if possible still more boastful and more dull than any of his other celebrations. It is necessary, therefore, to bring the case once more before the Public, for the sake both of correction and example; and as the work is not likely to find many readers, and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... tried on one occasion. My older brother had a falling out with a neighbor, and we three were alone in the woods. I had a dislike for the man, as much as my brother had. He was boastful, bigoted and disagreeable. But in this particular case I saw clearly that my brother was in the wrong, I felt compelled, therefore, to take sides with the other man. At this my brother was deeply offended, and it took him a long time ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... ignorance of my rights until now. The knowledge would at one time have gone far to render me useless for personal effort in any direction worthy of it. It would have made me conceited, ambitious, boastful: I don't know how many bad adjectives would have ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... cargoes stolen, under hollow forms of law. The high seas were treated as though they were the hunting preserves of these nations and American ships were quail and rabbits. The London "Naval Chronicle" at that time, and for long after, bore at the head of its columns the boastful lines: ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... complexions from the sun with fans and veils, as only the stately gentlewomen do in Germany and the Netherlands. As a people they are stout-hearted, vehement, eager, cruel in war, zealous in attack, little fearing: death; not revengeful, but fickle, presumptuous, rash, boastful, deceitful, very suspicious, especially of strangers, whom they despise. They are full of courteous and hypocritical gestures and words, which they consider to imply good manners, civility, and wisdom. They are well spoken, and very hospitable. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... case of Little-Faith, had tried to tell one another why that unhappy pilgrim's faith was so small, and how both their own faith and his might from that day have been made more. Hopeful, for some reason or other, was in a rude and boastful mood of mind that day, and Christian was more tart and snappish than we have ever before seen him; and, altogether, the opportunity of learning something useful out of Little-Faith's story has been all but lost to us. But, now, since there are so many of Little-Faith's kindred ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... universally admired. Every time that I told a citizen of Rotterdam that I liked the town he made a gesture of surprise. In speaking of their commerce and institutions they never let a vain expression escape them, nor even a boastful or complacent word. They always speak of what they are going to do, and never of what they have done. One of the first questions put to me when I named my country was, "What about its finances?" As to their own country, I observed that they know all that it is useful to know, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... man at five-and-twenty can put his hat on, and can say 'this hat covers the owner of this property and of the business which is transacted on this property,' I consider, Mr. Bintrey, that, without being boastful, he may be allowed to be deeply thankful. I don't know how it may appear to you, but so ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... ring the bells and fire the guns, And fling the starry banner out; Shout "Freedom!" till your lisping ones Give back their cradle-shout; Let boastful eloquence declaim Of honor, liberty, and fame; Still let the poet's strain be heard, With glory for each second word, And everything with breath agree To praise ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... their first practical illustration. These ideas, these principles generally termed New England ideas, and New England principles, it seems to me, have had much to do with that prosperity which we are now enjoying, and about which we are perhaps apt to be too boastful, but for which it is certain we cannot ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... from ourselves that these victories for which our bells ring and our flags wave, and for which we thank our God, may become a danger to us, should they make us vain and arrogant, boastful and indolent! God forbid! We will hold fast to our old modesty, with which we have so often been reproached, and which has indeed often enough degenerated into the undervaluing of ourselves and overvaluing of that which is foreign and despicable.—K. ENGELBRECHT, D.D.D.K., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... strove; And the weak hath vanquished the strong in fight, The eagle hath fled from the dove. [Footnote: Reference is here made to A-tos'sa's dream, as given by AEschylus in his tragedy of The Persians.] Great Jove, that reigns in the starry plains, To the heart of the king hath shown That the boastful parade of his pride was laid ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... always something overconfident and boastful, I think," said Corinne gravely. "They like to win their battles before they fight them, and beat back the foe before he appears. But we ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... there's nothing in it. In law you always have a chance to get into politics and be the president of your ward club or something like that, and from that on it's an easy matter to go on up. You can trust me to know the wires." And so the tenor of his boastful talk ran on, his mother a little bit awed and not altogether satisfied with the new 'Rastus that had returned ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... my dream true? and shall I slay the Gorgon? If thou didst really show me her face, let me not come to shame as a liar and boastful. Rashly and angrily I promised; but cunningly and patiently will ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... the windows. And he will think I am a coward, if I don't keep my word; no, I will let him see that I am not afraid of my own strength; I will show him I can go what length I please, and stop short when I please." Had Flatterwell heard this boastful speech, he would have been quite sure ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... Edward's assumption of the title of King of France, a measure of political expediency, rendered peace impossible. He was liberal in his gifts, magnificent in his doings, profuse in his expenditure, and, though not boastful, inordinately ostentatious. No sense of duty beyond what was then held to become a knight influenced his conduct. Although the early glories of his reign were greeted with applause, he never won the love ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... With a boastful laugh he repeated his assertion that it didn't take much courage to open a sealed door, especially when there might be a fortune concealed behind it. In his opinion it was cowardly to let oneself be frightened by ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... do before the season begins. She may need a secretary or a governess—or a—cook. Holy Saint Martin! but I can cook!" And Patsy clasped her hands in an ecstatic appreciation of her culinary art; it was the only one of which she was boastful. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... discharge of Changarnier, public reprimands from their constituencies, located in the industrial districts, branding their coalition with the Mountain as an act of high treason to the cause of order. Although, true enough, the boastful, vexatious and petty intrigues, through which the struggle of the party of Order with the President manifested itself, deserved no better reception, yet notwithstanding, this bourgeois party, that expects of its representatives to allow the military power to pass without resistance out of ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... give me comfort And condescend unto my nothingness, I'll ever pay you, O sweet miracle, An unexampled worship and devotion. Then too, with me your honour runs no risk; With me you need not fear a public scandal. These court gallants, that women are so fond of, Are boastful of their acts, and vain in speech; They always brag in public of their progress; Soon as a favour's granted, they'll divulge it; Their tattling tongues, if you but trust to them, Will foul the altar where their hearts have worshipped. But men like me are so discreet in love, That you may ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a kind of boastful sincerity about the man which convinced me. But his words put me in mind of ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... golfers sometimes do, that he cannot play with the cleek, that he gets equal or superior results with other clubs, and that therefore he has abandoned it to permanent seclusion in the locker, you may shake your head at him, for he is only deceiving himself. Like the wares of boastful advertisers, there is no other which is "just as good," and if a golfer finds that he can do no business with his cleek, the sooner he learns to do it the better will it be for ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... course of her former life, while her husband occupied the hearthside chair and told her stories of the war. He had a childlike clearness and simplicity of speech, and a self-forgetful habit of reminiscence. The war was the war to him, not a theatre for boastful individual action; but Amelia remembered now that he had seemed to hold heroic proportions in relation to that immortal past. One could hardly bring heroism into the potato-field and the cow-house; but after this lapse of ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... translate with any certainty. They are, however, interesting as records of the piety and religious feelings of the sovereigns of Babylon, and as affording numerous topographical notices of that famous city; while the boastful language of the inscription will often remind the reader of Nebuchadnezzar's words in Dan. iv. 30: "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... shapes itself as the hurrying dialogue is read! The key-note of merriment is struck by the Prince himself as he implores the aid of Poins to help him laugh at the excellent trick he has just played on the boastful but craven Falstaff, and the bustle and hilarity of the scene never flags for a moment. Even Francis, the drawer, whose vocabulary is limited to "Anon, anon, sir"—the fellow that had "fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman"—and the host himself, as perplexed as his servant ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... summarise) is expressive of one main fact. Being a satirist means being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very philosophical; but he had this permanent quality of the philosopher about him, that he always remembered people by their opinions. Elijah Pogram was to him the man who said that "his boastful answer to the tyrant and the despot was that his bright home was the land of the settin' sun." Mr. Scadder and Mr. Jefferson Brick were to him the men who said (in cooperation) that "the libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood." ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... and he was standing, in considerable perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young man opened his painted glass door. It was a hot afternoon, and Lapham was in his shirt sleeves. Scarcely a trace of the boastful hospitality with which he had welcomed Corey to his house a few days before lingered in his present address. He looked at the young man's face, as if he expected him to despatch whatever unimaginable ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the spirit of all other subjugated literature concerning the war,—a vainglorious and boastful spirit as to events that led only to the destruction of the political power of the South; a wronged and forgiving, if not quite cheerful, spirit as to the end itself. Vivid and powerful presentation of facts would not perhaps be expected of an author who calls herself "A Richmond Lady," and there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... life of the Italians, though much reduced in vigor, was therefore still, as formerly, concentrated in cities marked by distinct local qualities and boastful of their ancient glories. The courts of Ferrara and Urbino continued to form centers for literary and artistic coteries. Venice remained the stronghold of mental unrestraint and moral license, where thinkers uttered their thoughts with tolerable freedom ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... think that I did not know how brave you are? You are the truest soldier of us all, and I, who am not much given to worship, am on my knees before that shy gallantry of yours, which makes what courage we poor duffers have seem a vain and boastful thing. When I see you as I saw you last, small and white and clear and brave, I can't think of anything but the first crocuses at White Orchards, shining out, demure and valiant, fearless of wind and storm and cold—fearless ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... coat; that his waistcoat was of a combustible plaid pattern with gaiters to match; that he had taken his fingers many times to the jeweler, but not once to the manicure; that he was beautifully jingled and alcoholically boastful of his native land and that—a crowning touch—he wore flaring from an upper pocket of his coat a silk handkerchief woven in the design and colors of his country's flag. But, praises be, it was not our flag that he wore thus. It was the Union Jack. As we passed out into ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... appear to be inclined to talk even with Louis. He went to work upon the chart which included Khrysoko Bay, called Pifanio on some maps, and studied intently for a considerable time. It was clear to all on deck that he had something in his head, and it was believed that he was preparing to meet the boastful threats of Captain Mazagan. ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... preparations made so vigorously by the United States had already begun to produce an effect upon the belligerent feelings of the French Directory. The appointment of Washington to the chief command of the American armies had filled the boastful leaders in France with alarm; and the wily Talleyrand, with a sagacity possessed by few of his compeers, had already turned his thoughts toward reconciliation, and made indirect exertions to induce the United ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... experiencing a very common and natural reaction. Their courage had been put to the most severe test and had not given way. It was not difficult to understand their elation, and one could forgive their boastful talk of bloody deeds. One highly strung lad was dangerously near to nervous breakdown. He had bayoneted his first German and could not forget the experience. He told of it over and over as the line ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... of liberal principles, not because they were the most consistent advocates and friends of despotism in all its forms, intellectual, religious, and political, or the writers of casuistic books, or the perverters of educational instruction, or boastful missionaries in Japan and China, or cunning intriguers in the courts of princes, or artful confessors of the great, or uncompromising despots in the schools,—but because they interfered with her ascendency. It is true she despised their sophistries, ridiculed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... the glory of Moliere as well as that of Turenne; a German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull, common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... paid no attention to his boastful words, but the eight who had volunteered to accompany him were filled with self-pride so that they stood around vaingloriously beating upon their breasts, baring their fangs and screaming their hideous challenge until the jungle ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... women, Back to old Nokomis, Faint-heart! I will slay you as you stand there, As of old I slew her father!" But my Hiawatha answered, 175 Nothing daunted, fearing nothing: "Big words do not smite like war-clubs, Boastful breath is not a bow-string, Taunts are not as sharp as arrows, Deeds are better things than words are, 180 Actions mightier than boastings!" Then began the greatest battle That the sun had ever looked on, That the war-birds ever witnessed. All a Summer's day it ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... for when he came to our naval war, he had to appear as the champion of the beaten side, and to explain away defeat instead of chronicling victory. The contemporary American writers were quite as boastful and untruthful. No honorable American should at this day endorse their statements; and similarly, no reputable Englishman should permit his name to be associated in any way with James' book ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... I said, "Jack is a curious fellow in some ways—some call him a crank, but he isn't that. Still, he is something of a 'character,' and absolutely unconventional. I remember his making a bet, once, that he would punch out a boastful pugilist at the National Sporting Club—no, it wasn't at the N.S.C., it was at a place down East—'Wonderland,' they ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... was not really a true-born Briton. He waits to see what is being hung. He has these things now because he thinks they are right, not because they are beautiful, just as he used to have the Stag at Bay and the Boastful Hound. It is Leighton now; it was Landseer then. Really I believe that very soon the ladies' papers will devote a column to pictures. Something in this style. 'Smart people are taking down their Rossetti's ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... knew him well), dry and smart in his words, and with a face like a pair of nutcrackers, for his front teeth were gone, so that his lips seemed dried on his gums, like the skin of a mummy. He was withal too self-conceited and boastful, and malicious, full of gossip and ill-nature, and running down every one that did not believe that he (Doctor Pomius) was the only learned physician in the world. Following the celebrated rules laid down by Theophrastus ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... questions are answered there. The stars tell it all. When you look at them you know! They have put them on our flag. There are times when this seems but a poor nation: boastful, corrupt, violent, and preparing, as it is now, to steal another country by fraud and war; yet the stars on the flag always make me happy and confident. Do you see the constellations swinging above us, such unimaginable vastnesses, not roving or crashing through the illimitable at ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... given to talking in a boastful manner, after having seduced that easily deluded woman (the wife of Dames) into an illicit connection with him, allured her into a perilous fraud, and persuaded her by an accumulation of lies to accuse her innocent husband of treason, and to invent a story that ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... and weakness, on both sides, in a possible campaign. A popular idea of Edison that dies hard, pictures a breezy, slap-dash, energetic inventor arriving at new results by luck and intuition, making boastful assertions and then winning out by mere chance. The native simplicity of the man, the absence of pose and ceremony, do much to strengthen this notion; but the real truth is that while gifted with unusual imagination, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Jews are so haughty and boastful. They see that Shem, their father, alone has the promise of eternal blessing, which is given through Christ. So far, so good. But when they believe that the promise pertains not to faith but rather to the carnal descent, they are in error. This subject ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... to Miss Smith!—What could she possibly mean!"—And he repeated her words with such assurance of accent, such boastful pretence of amazement, that she could ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Bank had not languished before, and did not cease to occupy a front place in the attention of the principal of that establishment now. In boastful proof of his promptitude and activity, as a remarkable man, and a self-made man, and a commercial wonder more admirable than Venus, who had risen out of the mud instead of the sea, he liked to show how little his domestic affairs abated his business ardour. Consequently, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... sumacs, in lonely places, Bowed all summer with dust and heat, Like clean-clad children with rain-washed faces, Are dressed in scarlet from head to feet. And never a flower had the boastful summer, In all the blossoms that decked her sod, So royal hued as that later comer The ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,) Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... seems to be all that could be desired from anyone's standpoint. There's nothing boastful, nothing flattering or inconsistent. It simply expresses a patriotic duty performed in the greatest crisis in the history of our country. That generation passed through an ordeal second to none in the annals ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... law-loving people, fond of good cheer and strong drink, of shrewd, blunt speech, and a stubborn reticence, when speech would be useless or foolish; a people clean-living, faithful to friend and kinsman, truthful, hospitable, liking to make a fair show, but not vain or boastful; a people with perhaps little play of fancy or great range of thought, but cool-thinking, resolute, determined, able to realise the plainer facts of life clearly, and ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... on the rights of the natives or there will be quarrels and bloodshed. Tradition says that there was once a Chinese kingdom at the north of Borneo, whose chiefs married into the families of the principal Dyak chiefs; but it is the misfortune of the Chinese character to be both boastful and cowardly, and when they had irritated the Malays by their big words, they stood no chance of prevailing against them in war. If their enemies did not run away after the first attack and discharge of firearms, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... at the city, however, Lyle came aboard of the locomotive in quite a muddled condition. He was talkative and boastful now. He began to tell of the many famous special runs he had made, of the big salaries he had earned, and of his general ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... Anthropoidal Apes, With laughter wild and gay; They tried to catch that boastful one, But he always got away; So they yelled at him in chorus, Which he minded not a whit; And they pelted him with cocoanuts, Which didn't seem to hit; And then they gave him reasons, Which they thought of much ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... treacherous officers conversed in a similar strain for several minutes longer. Then came the sound of glasses being clinked as an accompaniment to a boastful toast. Talking boisterously, the two officers left the cabin, and presently the lads heard the sound of oars as von Hoffner was ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... mules, and by nightfall a city was in its initial stages—tent stores, open-air saloons, eating-booths, and canvas hotels. A few of the swarming incomers were skeptical of the find, but the larger number were hilariously boastful of their locations, and around their evening camp-fires groups gathered ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... makes it a matter of business life and death that one should make progress in method and quality. That his shoes wear is a matter of pride to the shoe manufacturer. "Blank tires are good tires" is not to be regarded as merely a boastful advertisement. If it was it would ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... This same boastful confidence was present among the pilots with whom McGee and Larkin were daily associated, but fortunately it was somewhat counterbalanced by the long-delayed orders sending the squadron to the front. April slipped away and May came. Still no orders. It was maddening! Yancey, Fouche, Hampden, ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... nothing of social forms, and the coachman's son who described his father's master as "the man that rides in dad's carriage," showed a finely democratic instinct. But the boastful child is a very unpleasant product of nature or of art. "We've got a private master comes to teach us at home, but we ain't proud, because Ma says it's sinful," quoth Morleena Kenwigs, under her mother's instructions, when Nicholas Nickleby ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... philosophy of the conservatives of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour, opposed the Stoa or ignored it. It was principally antipathy towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... you say that my Huelsemann letter is boastful and rough, I shall own the soft impeachment. My excuse is twofold: 1. I thought it well enough to speak out, and tell the people of Europe who and what we are, and awaken them to a just sense of the unparalleled growth of this country. 2. I wished to write a paper which should touch the national ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... blind confidence in himself, sometimes precipitated him into almost inextricable situations, into which he threw himself headlong, and from which he never emerged without hard blows—for if he was as adventurous and boastful as a Gascon, he was as obstinate and opinionated ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... know If, during all these downward-tending years, Edward kept well his faith with me. I know He used to tell me, in his boastful way, How he had broke the hearts of pretty maids. And that if he were single—well-a-day! The time was past for thinking upon that! And I had heart to toss the badinage Back in his teeth, with pay of kindred coin; And ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... that; for, it is a common saying, among our people, that the German and Low Dutch fortune-tellers are the best known. They have had, or pretend to have had, witches in New England; but no one, hereabouts, puts any faith in the pretence. It is like all the bragging of these boastful Yankees!" ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... did sound rather boastful, but I had to put it strong. A mealy-mouthed promise wouldn't hold ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... and Apple-Tree disputed as to which was the most beautiful. When their strife was at its height, a Bramble from the neighboring hedge lifted up its voice, and said in a boastful tone: "Pray, my dear friends, in my presence at least cease from ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... sort of thing. It aroused at once their emulation and their condemnation of each other. He seized the opportunity, but—for some reason, he knew not why—awkwardly and clumsily, with a simulated pathos that was lachrymose, a self-assertion that was boastful, and a dramatic manner that was unreal. Suddenly the girl ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... monk of the thirteenth century." [Footnote: Croly, "Promise of American Life," p. 90.] He was not, like Jackson, simply a large, forceful version of the plain American trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boastful show of strength, powerful as he was physically and intellectually. He shared genuinely, with no consciousness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of his neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all their innocence." But he made ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... never said a boastful word, but it was impossible to help seeing what a hero the man had been—brave, true, resourceful, unselfish. He sat there in his little room and made those things live again for his hearers. By a lift of the eyebrow, a twist ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... inquiring into the rightfulness of title, and urged the line of 49 deg.. Mr. Crittenden followed in the same vein, and in a reply to Senator William Allen of Ohio, chairman of Foreign Affairs, made a speech abounding in sarcasm and ridicule. The Whigs having in the campaign taken no part in the boastful demand for 54 deg. 40', were not subjected to the humiliation of retracing imprudent steps ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... since the world has grown so wise and made such progress in the art of running rapidly downhill, is even the aristocratic British peer quite easy in his mind regarding his fair peeress? Can he leave her to her own devices with safety? Are there not men, boastful too of their "blue blood," who are perhaps ready to stoop to the thief's trick of entering his house during his absence by means of private keys, and stealing away his wife's affections?—and is not she, though a mother of three or four children, ready to receive with favor the mean robber of her ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull. Bad news; she brings bad news, muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard. Hast seen ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... to this Philadelphus; he is young and boastful, talkative as a woman. If he means to be king, as those who knew him in Ephesus were given to believe, it is not unnatural that some of us, without fortune or tie to keep us home, should follow him—as parasites, if you will—to share in the largess which he will surely ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... ought to see me shin up a smooth tent-pole," said Ben, rubbing the pitch off his hands, with a boastful wag of ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... monstrous personality which leered out of Logan Black's diary. Boastful of his own iniquity, swaggering in his wickedness, fatuous with self-love, he recounted his deeds with gusto and with particularity. They did not read a quarter of this terrible autobiography at the time, but they read enough to see ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... he exclaimed, in a boastful tone, "do you know that this old fellow lying here, won't get the drink out of the veins of that dainty creature he was so thirsty for? No! nor ever cheat any sweet little Red Riding Hood into thinking him her grandmother? This is the last of him. ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... you seek, you shall not need to go far in your quest," returned Ogilvy. "Tarry till this controversy be ended, and if I match not your Spanish blade with a Scottish broad-sword, and approve you as recreant at heart as you are boastful and injurious of speech, may Saint Andrew forever after withhold from ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... proportioned, neat, and generally somewhat boyish. His expression is bright and mobile, his lips and teeth are generally distorted and discoloured by the constant chewing of betel nut. They are a vain, dressy, boastful, excitable, not to say frivolous people — cheerful, talkative, sociable, fond of fun and jokes and lively stories; though given to exaggeration, their statements can generally be accepted as founded on fact; they are industrious and energetic, and are great wanderers; to the last ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... something more. They fell straightway to gambling, sharper and fiercer than before, actuated now by the flaming spirit of this son of Belllounds. Luck, misleading and alluring, favored Jack for a while, transforming him until he was radiant, boastful, exultant. Then it changed, as did his expression. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... who gathered to our camp, were drunk with the most intoxicating of all stimulants—human blood. This flush of victory excited the redskins' vanity to a boastful frenzy. There was wild talk of wiping the pale-face out of existence; and if a weaker man than Grant had been at the head of the forces, not a white in the settlement would have escaped massacre. In spite of the bitterness ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
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