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More "Conceit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Now, she was a very poor hand at "making up," and did not understand "Shipwrecks" or "Desert Islands" in the least; but this would not have mattered if she had been willing to learn. Joined, however, to complete ignorance on those subjects, she had a large amount of conceit, and seemed to think she could do everything better than anyone else. For instance, if they were going to play "Shipwrecks"—"I'll be captain," she would exclaim at once. This had always been Ambrose's part, and he rather prided himself on his knowledge of nautical affairs, gathered from ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... therefore, blamed for much clumsiness that he could not prevent and for a good deal of sensitiveness that came quite simply from his eagerness to do what he was told and his inability to see his way to do it. He was not, at this time, easy with strangers and seemed to them both conceited and awkward. Conceit was far from him—he was, in fact, amazed at so feeble a creature as himself!—but awkward he was, and very often greedy, selfish, impetuous, untruthful and even cruel: he was nearly always dirty, and attributed this to the evil wishes of some malign fairy who flung mud upon him, ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... interposed. It was but the foolish conceit of some teasing neighbor, she said, and not worth further discussion. Keith's blood boiled in his veins at this calm dismissal of the subject, but he gave no sign. He saw her glance warily at himself from time ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... all the party in the Chateau d'Anzy were astir, little La Baudraye having arranged a day's sport for the Parisians—less for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit. He was delighted to make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste land that he was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost some hundred thousand francs, but which might yield an increase ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... me with arguments to show that in anything like a fair market he would have fetched twenty-five dollars, sure—a thing which was plainly nonsense, and full or the baldest conceit; I wasn't worth it myself. But it was tender ground for me to argue on. In fact, I had to simply shirk argument and do the diplomatic instead. I had to throw conscience aside, and brazenly concede that he ought to have brought twenty-five dollars; whereas I was quite well ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hath taken Waisford and destroyed it with the country for ten miles round about it, and killed all the women who could not run fast enough, and such of the men as did not run to him. And this he did upon the admirable conceit that the men, having no women of their own, would take pains that they should not be singular in the country, but full of lessons in butchery, would become butchers themselves. It seems that there was ground for the opinion. As for me, I should certainly ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... consider—and I agree with them—that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted as much as possible to women. Let me ask—of what period of youth and manhood does not the same hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to old age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed; ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and they had stopped wonderingly to listen. They talked at first vaguely to this discreet audience of space and darkness, and then, growing bolder, spoke to each other and of themselves. Invested by the infinite gravity of nature, they had no fear of human ridicule to restrain their youthful conceit or the extravagance of their unimportant confessions. They talked of their tastes, of their habits, of their friends and acquaintances. They settled some points of doctrine, duty, and etiquette, with the sweet seriousness of youth and ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... advantage of him: unless indeed they too, in their Alexandrian predilections, had a sneaking regard for certain shapings of verse into altars and hatchets, such as have been charged upon Theocritus himself, and which might be supposed to warrant any other conceit on occasion.] ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... ere Dick felt conscious that his could be no monopoly of adoration. Free trade was at once declared by glances, whispers and inquiries from a succession of well-dressed young gentlemen, wise doubtless in their own conceit, yet not wanting in that worldly temerity which impels fools to rush in where angels fear to tread, and gives the former class of beings, in their dealings with that sex which is compounded of both, an immeasurable ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... took possession of the town of Mansoul, he brought thither, with himself, a great number of Diabolonians, men of his own conditions. Now among these there was one whose name was Mr. Self-Conceit, and a notable brisk man he was, as any that in those days did possess the town of Mansoul. Diabolus, then, perceiving this man to be active and bold, sent him upon many desperate designs, the which he managed better, and more to the pleasing of his lord, than most that came ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... with infinity to each of them, we have the complex idea of an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely wise and happy being. And though we are told that there are different species of angels; yet we know not how to frame distinct specific ideas of them: not out of any conceit that the existence of more species than one of spirits is impossible; but because having no more simple ideas (nor being able to frame more) applicable to such beings, but only those few taken from ourselves, and ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... the other, with a look of evident disgust, "your conceit is considerable. I had thought to be somewhat confidential with you in regard to this idea of mine, but you seem to swallow it so easy, and to look upon it as so natural a thing, that— that—Do you suppose you've nothin' to do but ask the girl ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... mother will pity the poor little soul," Grace declared. "I'm sure she belongs to enough charitable boards and committees so that she ought to be delighted that we bring a real 'case,' as she calls them, to her," and Grace laughed at her own conceit. ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... future in a fashion which made Maisie poke fun at me for a crowing cockerel. It was only natural that I should suffer a little from swelled head that night—I should not have been human otherwise. But Andrew Dunlop took the conceit out of me with a vengeance when Maisie and I told him the news, and I explained everything to him in his back-parlour. He was at times a man of many words, and at times a man of few words—and when he said ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... should beat the pick of England and France? Throw over the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing to show for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we all have, with a thoroughly provincial conceit, which some of us must plead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... religious fanaticism; because they were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life; because at the great epoch of Europe's reawakening they chose the wrong side and adhered to it with fatal obstinacy. This obstinacy was disastrous to their neighbors and ruinous to themselves. During the short period of three reigns (between 1598 and 1700) they ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... GROW, not only in size, but also in ability to perform their proper work, just as individuals do. We call a person conceited who thinks that he is perfect, especially if he boasts of it. But his conceit is itself an imperfection and a hindrance to growth. So the patriotic citizen is not one who is unable to see defects in his community, or who refuses to acknowledge them, but one who has high CIVIC ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... come to understand what we have a right to mean by space, it does not imply a boundless conceit on his part to hazard the statement that space is infinite. When he has said this, he has said very little. What shall we say to the statement that ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... to hear that the "Phebus" or systematised conceit, for which the period is famous, and which the beloved Marguerite herself did not a little favour, is abundant in them. From a large selection of M. Reynier's, I cull, as perhaps the most delightful of all these, if not also of all known to me ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Fine shifts to cover that you cannot hide! No, Phoebus; by your looks may be discride Some hid conceit that harbors in your thought Which hath therein some straunge impression wrought, That by the course thereof you seeme to mee An other man then ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... which it were better a boy should not know were said. Conceit is only too ready to take youth ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... been promulgated by an erratic God who even finds pleasure in blundering. It really is a most amusing spectacle to watch Strauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. But for whose benefit is this entertainment given? For the smug and noble "We," that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they may possibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible and pitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulously imploring their leader to come to their aid. That is why Strauss pours forth the "soothing ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with contempt and derision. Moral philosophy is discarded, and the maxims of ancient wisdom are unworthy of their notice. In this manner, eloquence is dethroned; she is banished from her rightful dominions, and obliged to dwell in the cold regions of antithesis, forced conceit, and pointed sentences. The consequence is, that she, who was once the sovereign mistress of the sciences, and led them as handmaids in her train, is now deprived of her attendants, reduced, impoverished, and, stripped of her usual honours (I might say ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... requisite from your zeal and friendship. Whenever it shall strike you that my pen begins to contract, as it were, the ossification of old age, whenever you see my genius in its climateric, do not fail to give me a hint. There is no trusting to one's self in such a case: pride and conceit were the original sin of man. The probe of criticism must be entrusted to an impartial stander-by, of fine talents and unshaken probity. Both those requisites center in you: you are my choice, and I give myself up ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... glad you two fellows beat him," announced Gif. "Maybe it will take a little of the conceit out of him." ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... book, entitled "Innocency with her Open Face." At the same time he addressed a letter to Lord Arlington, principal secretary of state. In the letter he maintained that he had "subverted no faith, obedience or good life," and he insisted on the natural right of liberty of conscience: "To conceit," he said, "that men must form their faith of things proper to another world by the prescriptions of mortal men, or else they can have no right to eat, drink, sleep, walk, trade, or be at liberty and live in this, to me seems both ridiculous and dangerous." ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... sympathy they have evolved for all suffering and sorrow, but at any rate it is a racial momentum which our ancestors for four thousand years have been forging and refining in the hottest fires;" and whether it be conceit or inspiration, he adds, "and think not that we, to-day, in the comfortable lassitude of American life, can destroy it." The spirit is greater than the man; the Jew may be lost or be assimilated, but the Jewish ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Rosalind Merton, sidling up to Maggie and casting some disdainful glances at poor Priscilla, "the conceit of some people! Of all forms of conceit, preserve me from ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... which Washington, the white mule, and one Jared Dixon figured. It is evident that the editor of this paper did not have an exalted opinion of the great patriot, as he speaks of him as "a man who has the conceit of believing that there would not be any such country as America if there had not been a George Washington to prevent its annihilation." From this account it appears that Jared Dixon was a Welshman, who lived on a hundred-acre tract of land adjoining the Mount Vernon plantation. Washington ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... distrust and dislike toward Germany. So great is this antipathy that the Germans imagine there is a malignant conspiracy against them. An upstart nation, suddenly wealthy and powerful, Germany has developed an inordinate self-conceit and self-assertion. The German glories in being a realist. He thinks only of political power and colonial expansion. Might is the supreme test of right. He constantly emphasizes the indelible character of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... thin, poker-like Quotient with the fierce white moustache to the enormous, puffy Multiplicand, Sara thought they were the most pompous lot she had ever seen. However, since they were officers and units, she could imagine that they might have some excuse; but what possible excuse could there be for conceit in the Fractions, every one of whom had something missing about him? Some of them, of course, lacked only an ear or a little finger; but numbers of them had only one leg or one arm, and many of them were much worse off! Why, at the farthest side of the Three-Times table Sara saw a Fraction ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... but with two ashamed hands. Not since his father's death had any one talked to him like this—never with so much tenderness and truth and with every word meant for his good. All his selfrighteousness, his silly conceit and vainglory stood out before him. What an ass he had been. What a coxcomb. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... thought, and thought—"Science, to be sure," I thought, "is everywhere the same, and truth is the same"—so I was up and off, in God's name, to foreign parts, to the heathen.... What would you have? I was infatuated with youth and conceit; I didn't want, you know, to get fat before my time, though they say it's healthy. Though, indeed, if nature doesn't put the flesh on your bones, you won't see much fat ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Scripture, at the knowledge that it is not itself that aggregate, that it does not form part of transmigratory existence, but is the True, the Real, the Self, whose nature is pure intelligence; then knowing itseif to be of the nature of unchangeable, eternal Cognition, it lifts itself above the vain conceit of being one with this body, and itself becomes the Self, whose nature is unchanging, eternal Cognition. As is declared in such scriptural passages as 'He who knows the highest Brahman becomes even Brahman' (Mu. Up. III, 2, 9). And this is the real nature of the individual ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... social—distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere decoration, we judge the ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... letters show more than one stroke of the pen. He is an Englishman, but learned to write in Germany. He was once a cook. He does not write Malcolm as if used to it, and that is an assumed name. Great nerve, assurance, self-reliance, and patience. Is fond of children. Has more conceit than his manners indicate, kind-hearted man and even generous in his way, but has no notion of truth or morals. Should say he had spent much of his time in Baden Baden and other like places. Is good at gambling, but burglary is his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... eager vehemence. "They were the letters of a hot-tempered girl, blinded by pique and self-conceit, and carelessly indulging in a foolish spite which in her heart she ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... he agreed, "but we were both a bit scared yesterday, old chap, and the more I think of this dog business the less I like it. It was mere conceit on my part that made me say it was bound to be some natural phenomenon merely because I couldn't understand how the effect ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... granted. In a hundred little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the man ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... "If monkeys, why not donkeys? Certainly they do. All creatures have some means of communicating their thoughts to each other. Why man in his conceit should think otherwise I don't know, unless it be that the birds and beasts in their conceit probably think that they alone of all the creatures ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... will, however, talk to your father about it, and we will hear what he shall say. In the meantime, raise your spirits, and don't be so easily alarmed. You are naturally nervous and timid, and this is merely a poor, cowardly conceit that has got into your head; but your own good sense will soon show you the folly of yielding to a mere fancy. Amuse yourself on the spinet, and play some brisk music that will cheer your spirits; it ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... would go a step farther than either of these writers. Beyle is an ignorant braggart, not only in music, but in art generally, and such esprit as his art criticisms exhibit would be even more common than it unfortunately now is, if he were oftener equalled in conceit and arrogance. The pillorying of a humbug is so laudable an object that the reader will excuse the digression, which, moreover, may show what miserable instruments a poor biographer has sometimes to make use of. Another informant, unknown to fame, but apparently more trustworthy, furnishes us ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... spoken word should interpret what we do. It is fair enough to tell your sister-in-law what you think and ask her judgment upon it, if you can trust yourself not to rub your own judgment in too hard. If you are unmarried, and a teacher, you will have to concede to her preposterous marital conceit a humble and inquiring attitude, and console your flustered soul by setting it to the ingenious task of teaching by means of a graduated series of artful inquiries. Don't, oh don't! seek for an outspoken victory. Be ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance. Though Murray with his Miller may combine To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their former ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... of a book once much admired, De 'l'Art Chretien. In a later work entitled Epilogue a l'Art Chretien, but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... bodies. Yet by an odd anomaly this ogre benefactor, this Brocklehurst, must have been a zealous and self-sacrificing enthusiast, with all his goodness spoiled by an imperious love of authority, an extravagant conceit. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... only by accepting the conditions of the theater itself. Daudet and Zola had more of the needful understanding of their fellow creatures than Flaubert and Goncourt, more of the necessary sympathy; but they had all of them not a little of the conceit of the self-made man and they assumed the egotistic attitude of the cultivated aristocrat. It would have been well if they could have taken to heart what George Sand once wrote to Flaubert: "It seems to me that your ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... tried, and I'm almost sure (only please don't repeat this loud in the woods) that if you could only catch a fairy, and put it in the corner, and give it nothing but bread and water for a day or two, you'd find it quite an improved character; it would take down its conceit a little, ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... by other things, and even after Hanno, with proud conceit, repeated his momentous question, he waited ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... like 'both,'" with composed lightness. "If you had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with pride. But 'both' leaves me unsatisfied. It interferes with the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent power. One likes to contemplate a large picture of one's self—not plain, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the greatest masters of the art. People who take for granted the conceits because of the "wildness" of Ariosto, and the good taste because of the "regularity" of Tasso, just assume the reverse of the fact. It is a rare thing to find a conceit in Ariosto; and, where it does exist, it is most likely defensible on some Shakspearian ground of subtle propriety. Open Tasso in almost any part, particularly the love-scenes, and it is marvellous if, before long, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... the following:—' . . . For, it was in vain that the middle ages strove to guard the buried spirit of progress. When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave clothes laid aside. Humanity had risen from the dead.' It was only Wilde who could contrive a literary conceit of that description; but readers will observe with different feelings, according to their temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of thought developed in the essay. It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold Medallist ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... men either imitate their teachers, too often second-rate drawing masters, enjoying at best a dull acquaintance with the Italian fifteenth and English eighteenth centuries, or, in revolt, set up for themselves as independent, hedgerow geniuses, ignorant, half-trained, and swollen by their prodigious conceit to such monsters as vastly astonish all those who can remember ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... rejoined the other, with adorable conceit. "You aren't used to it yet, but one soon gets into it, you know! See how perfectly at my ease I am after ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... first to do several businesses of the King's, then on board Captain Fisher's ship, which we hire to carry goods to Tangier. All the way going and coming I reading and discoursing over some papers of his which he, poor man, having some experience, but greater conceit of it than is fit, did at the King's first coming over make proposals of, ordering in a new manner the whole revenue of the kingdom, but, God knows, a most weak thing; however, one paper I keep wherein he do ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... kingdom, some smart public buildings (with S. P. Q. B. emblazoned on them, at which pompous inscription one cannot help laughing), and other rows of houses somewhat resembling a little Rue de Rivoli. Whether from my own natural greatness and magnanimity, or from that handsome share of national conceit that every Englishman possesses, my impressions of this city are certainly anything but respectful. It has an absurd kind of Lilliput look with it. There are soldiers, just as in Paris, better dressed, and doing a vast deal of drumming and bustle; and yet, somehow, ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... since both the oracles of Delphi and the Sibyl's prophecies were wholly delivered in verses; for that same exquisite observing of number and measure in the words, and that high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet, did seem to have some divine ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... discouraged at the halting progress of the First Reader Class in Natural Science, when, early in October, the Principal ushered into Room 18, Miss Eudora Langdon, Lecturer on Biology and Nature Study in a Western university, a shining light in the world of education, and an orator in her own conceit. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... The conceit was well worthy of my late friend in one of his most fanciful moods. In other volumes the same substitution had been made, so that to one not versed in literature it would have seemed as though "Thomas Bragdon, Esquire," ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... here,'—striking on his bosom—'nothing there'—smiting the wall—'and nothing there'—stamping—'nothing but God's Grace! We walk upon it, we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe; and a puppy in pyjamas prefers self-conceit!' The huge dark man stood over against Herrick by the line of the divers' helmets, and seemed to swell and glow; and the next moment the life had gone from him. 'I beg your pardon,' said he; 'I see ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... any other temper unbecoming a man who has engaged in the public service. If, on the contrary, I should undertake the election, and fail of success, I was full as anxious that it should be manifest to the whole world that the peace of the city had not been broken by my rashness, presumption, or fond conceit of my ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... laces. Ten to one but what she will marry that lame imp next door as soon as she is grown, and endow him with the whole of it—that 'little devil on two sticks,' and I must have my run before then, of course." She laughed merrily at the conceit. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Mrs. Charrington brusquely, "don't trouble yourself about him. I haven't lived fifty years for nothing. Oh! these men, these men! They take themselves too seriously, the dear creatures. But they are just like ourselves, with a little more conceit and considerably less wit. And they are not really worth all the trouble we take for them. I must get to know your medallist, my dear. That was a strong face and an honest face. I have heard John rave about him. John is my young son, first year in medicine. His judgment, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... But true expression, like th' unchanging Sun, 315 Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon, It gilds all objects, but it alters none. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable; A vile conceit in pompous words express'd, 320 Is like a clown in regal purple dress'd: For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort, As several garbs ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... not inaptly, the evolution of the old ship of the line under full canvas into the modern man-of-war, sailless and grim, and the conceit is strengthened by the warlike build of the electric sweeper. It is easy to imagine the iron flanges that sweep the snow from the track to be rammers for a combat at close quarters, and the canvas hangers that shield the brushes, torpedo-nets for defence against a hidden enemy. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... questions that at last he got the particulars from Hiram, which naturally he very much enjoyed. These particulars were recounted with modesty, without the slightest exhibition of egotism or conceit. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a servant to be had far or near,' she went on with agitated volubility; 'and as for another like myself, of course that's too much to be hoped for.' She did not say this out of conceit, but merely as representing the actual state ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... I being lesser in mine owne conceit for to obey you, then any of those which you haue vnder your command; and greater in desire to doe you greater seruices, doe appeare before your Lordship with so much confidence of receiuing fauour, as if in effect this my good ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... perfectly normal, healthy boy. Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to record; he did not lisp in periods. Genius was not written upon his brow, nor tied upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale fervor of precocity, or the shyness of premature conceit. He was absorbed in childish things, loved play, shirked his studies, dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and regarded "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad the Sailor" as the end of all literary things. The savagery of boyhood he lacked. ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... exclaimed the Flower angrily. 'I am sure I am'—she hesitated a moment—'quite as lovely as a Rose, or any other garden beauty;' but she could not help hanging her head for very shame whilst uttering this piece of self-conceit. ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... for Dreda Saxon," grumbled Norah of the spectacles one day when she and Susan walked together in the "crocodile" along a dull country lane. "A regular black, cringing slave—and what thanks do you get for it, I'd like to know? None! Not one little scrap. She's such a bat of self-conceit that she doesn't even know that she is helped. If you did a hundredth part as much for other people they'd go off ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... very unlike, both in appearance and character. Fred, the elder of the two, was a large, muscular, ruddy-faced boy, not much in love with books. He was of an over-bearing disposition, and had a great deal of conceit. ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... self-complacency was not of that imperturbable sort which, however intolerable to others, has at least the merit of keeping its possessor content and tranquil. With him it partook more of the nature of egotism than of self-conceit, and it therefore made him always restless and continually dissatisfied. But no effort was too great for Madame Recamier's devotion. Her friends looked upon her sacrifices with feelings of mingled regret and admiration, but she herself was unconscious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... For conceit and vanity and vainglory. Go away! My head is fit to split. Natalina, why haven't you given me my smelling salts? And why will you ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... was then no more than twenty-five,—an age at which I see the young fellows now groping about them, with no notion what they are going to do with their lives. However; I suppose every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... Great Mother became confused with the pestle, so, "the Soma-plant, whose stalks are crushed by the priests to make the Soma-libation, becomes in the Vedas itself the Crusher or Smiter, by a very characteristic and frequent Oriental conceit in accordance with which the agent and the person or thing acted ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... out of his element, he was certainly not out of conceit with himself. He gave a cheery little nod to every face that was turned to him, and stood, his hands thrust through his belt, his legs wide apart, surveying the company ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... must make allowances for the natural pride and conceit of these men. We know that they are half-savages, while they, as armed fighting-men accustomed to their petty wars amongst themselves, most likely look down upon us as half-barbarian people, whom they hope some day ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... Canons went away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town, because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a pleasant conceit, and that the Bishops were right cunning men, and had ding'd the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... from my reverie with a laugh at Thorndyke's quaint conceit and a glance at the grotesquely distorted reflection of my face in the ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... Standard (April 7). The gentry present were few, the nobility none, the clergy one only, while 'the mob beneath the grand stand was Athenian in its levity, in its recklessness, in its gaping expectancy, in its self-love and self-conceit—in everything but its acuteness.' 'If, sir, the nobility, the gentry, the clergy are to be alarmed, overawed, or smothered by the expression of popular opinion such as this, and if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... exists than the reputation for talent which this class acquire on a flimsy basis of superficial brilliance in conversation or a penchant for witty repartee. They are self-opinionated and egoistical, with a conceit and assurance out of all proportion to their abilities. Their mental perspective is distorted and they are conspicuous for their obstinacy. In conversation they are prolix and pretentious, and they often contract religious mania, in which their ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... of Tulip's childhood, each with its little conceit of treasure: one had a toy, and another a lamb, another a bird; and all of them hunted and caught the thing they loved, and kissed it and again let go. So it went on, over and over again, more sad than the sight of a quaker as ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... exposition of the weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... of human institutions secondary to religious faith, thus completely putting the cart before the horse, has survived that distant revolution, and is already flourishing in more eastern climes. It is as near an approach to an idolatrous worship of self, as human conceit has recently tolerated. ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... get a preliminary idea of what the distortion of the signal would be, I sent a single dot, which should have been recorded upon my automatic paper by a mark about one-thirty-second of an inch long. Instead of that it was twenty-seven feet long! If I ever had any conceit, it vanished from my boots up. I worked on this cable more than two weeks, and the best I could do was two words per minute, which was only one-seventh of what the guaranteed speed of the cable should be when laid. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the whole of the world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The Negroes of the West Indies number a good deal more than two million souls. Does this suggester of extravagances mean that the prejudices and vain conceit of the few dozens whom he champions should be made to override and overbear, in political arrangements, the serious and solid interests of so many [187] hundreds of thousands? That "the two races are not equal" ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... healthy corrective to our overweening conceit to remind ourselves that, remarkable and valuable as it is, it is a mere infant in arms compared to the superb powers of replacement and repair possessed by our more remote ancestors. Most invertebrates and many ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... provinces with a mixture of respect, contempt, and apprehension. She was an incalculable force, with a predisposition towards novelty, and novelty, especially if founded on theory, is abhorrent to such as old Johnny Galvin the steward, or Peter Flood the gardener, or, stiffest in her own conceit of all, Mrs. Twomey ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... them sympathy with all others, as the high cultivation of one virtue is said to bring all the rest in its train. But this man talked the shibboleth of his craft over one's head to other members of his clique with a defiance of good manners arising more from conceit than from ignorance of the ways of society; and with a transparent intention of being overheard and admired which reminded me of the little self-conscious conceits of children before visitors. He ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Court of Henri III., pleased her till he was going to the army, when he begged for one favour before his departure, which was only to put her hand to the hilt of his sword, a compliment so insipid that her Majesty was out of conceit with him ever after. She approved the gallant manner of M. de Montmorency much more than she loved his person. The aversion she had to the pedantic behaviour of Cardinal de Richelieu, who in his amours was as ridiculous ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... mustache, then in vogue among the fashionables, and proffered his suggestions with the quiet assurance that comes from a thorough appreciation of the deference due the man who is "real quality" in the Southland, and yet without the faintest suggestion of superciliousness or conceit ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... a conceit which reminds one of the pretty epistle of Philostratus, in which the footsteps of the beloved are called [Greek: ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... "But, Mr. Frohman, this is my way of doing it," or "I feel it this way," and like manifestations of actors' conceit or argument would never be met with ridicule or contempt. Sometimes he would say, "Try it my way first," or "Do you like that?" or "Does this give you a better feeling?" He never said, "You must do thus and so." He was alert to every suggestion. As a result he got the very best ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... English, having been born in Martinique; and they talked much together in French, looking at me occasionally, as if I were the subject of their discourse. It is probable conscience was at the bottom of this conceit of mine; but the latter now became so strong, as to induce me to determine to look out for a vessel for myself, and be off again. With this view, I quitted a negro who had been sent with me to market, under the pretence ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... thou mine," and made his Eve thus reverently submissive to her Adam, he little thought of bright girls in the nineteenth century, well versed in science, philosophy, and the languages, sitting in the senior class of a college of the American republic, laughing his male conceit to scorn. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... bishops!' cried the judge; 'that's a merry conceit indeed. I know what you mean by bishops—rascals like yourself, Kidderminster bishops, factious, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... continued Dick, turning upon the uncomfortable Mr. Ellis, "your self-conceit so fills every part of your body that the only thing for you is to stand on your head. Go to the rear tentpole and stand on your head. You may brace your feet against the pole. But remain on your head until we make sure that all the conceit ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... for the other: simplicity may be improved, but pride and conceit never. Well, I don't discourage you; I think it will please Sir Everard, from what he said when I jested with him about it; only I hope that intolerable papa, with his brogue, and his snuff, and his Latin, and his insufferable ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... man would pursue Philosophy, his first task is to throw away conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he has a ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... will-of-the-wisp; but a will-of-the-wisp has been known to lead a man by accident to a better path than that which he had lost.' There is no use, therefore, in wasting our pity upon those who may happen to suffer by the first of the two delusions which I noticed, viz., the conceit that either Australia or California offers a lottery without blanks. Blanks too probably they will draw; but what matters it, when this disappointment cannot reach them until they find themselves amidst a wilderness of supplementary hopes? One prize has been lost, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... position that was an unfair one, and that she regretted it. Nothing franker or more generous could have been conceived, but somehow it roused within me the impulse to make her conscious of the weakness of her sex. My masculine conceit rose and demanded an opportunity of self-assertion. I went to her, and she seemed more attractive than ever. Her independence and self-reliance nettled me, and I was mean enough to yield to the desire to see if she could resist me. But I was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... to repress This strong conceit of cleverness, Said, "I will show you, if you please, A ...
— Rhymes Old and New • M.E.S. Wright
... that attorney," said the admiral, as he put the letter in his pocket, "and almost enough to put one in conceit of lawyers." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... not good enough to compensate for the mischief they did him. He spoke his own language with purity: he had some merit, but more conceit: and he made no use of the merit he had, but to make himself enemies." Voltaire adds, "Bussi was released at the end of eighteen months; but he was in disgrace all the rest of his life, in vain protesting a regard for Louis XIV." Bussi died 1693. Of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... dangerous extreme, and what we are the aptest to fall into. Simplicity passes for dulness when it is not accompanied with great elegance and propriety. On the contrary, there is something surprising in a blaze of wit and conceit. Ordinary readers are mightily struck with it, and falsely imagine it to be the most difficult, as well as most excellent way of writing. Seneca abounds with agreeable faults, says Quinctilian—abundat dulcibus vitiis; and for that reason is the more ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... largest kind. He had never heard such tremendous roaring growls as the disappointed grisly was now uttering. Between these he could also hear, at no great distance, the mournful howls of One-eye. The sagacious animal had not self-conceit enough to match his weight and size against a brute that could have whipped a lion in five minutes, but he could express his feelings concerning the state ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat, where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious fellow that was brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor alteration, supposing it to be only a conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as it went down, caused her to vomit, and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin, which the woman no sooner saw, but, believing she had cast it up, she presently found herself ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... how De Boursy, much reduced in bulk by a considerable leakage of conceit, came across the Dop Doctor? In a drink-saloon, in a music-hall, in a gaming-house or an opium-den, at any other of the places of recreation where, after consulting and visiting hours, that exemplary father and serious-minded ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... that the Guards Brigades were the finest brigades in the Army, that this particular brigade was the best of all the Guards, that his battalion was the best of the Brigade. Hitherto he had rather deprecated these remarks as savoring of pride and self-conceit, but now he began to believe that they must be true; and so believing, if he had but known it, he had taken another long step on the way to becoming the perfect soldier, who firmly believes his regiment the finest in ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... was to have been "a continued allegory or dark conceit," in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... who could not be conquered in argument, and had been confronted by a smooth-faced lad of twenty, until now, he was still the glory of the Servi; and well might the friars watch in triumph, as one by one he gathered laurels for their order. A little human flush of triumph or of self-conceit would have added charm to his argument, but these notes were lacking; clearly, logically, unanswerably, he met each question, convincing without emotion and hastening from the gay court, of which these intellectual tourneys were the delight, to the welcome seclusion of the convent. If he ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... be free, From Prussian Kings' autocracy: The world shall see all the battles cease, With dawn of universal peace. Each German worker has to pay One-fourth of what he earns per day To keep two million marching feet And please a Kaiser's mad conceit. Oh God! we're punished bitterly For Kaiser Wilhelm's blasphemy; Three million of our sons are slain, Let sacrifice be ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... little while do even the gentlest persons "see red"—asceticism appeared to him as a blasphemy against the order of nature and of nature's God. His vow of perpetual chastity, made with so passionate an enthusiasm, for the moment appeared to him an act of absolutely monstrous vanity and self-conceit. In his stupid ignorance he had tried to be wiser than his Maker, preferring the ordinances of man, to the glad and merciful purposes of God. In so doing had he not, only too possibly, committed the unpardonable sin, the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... walks where duty leads, Kausalya, known for gracious deeds, Mother of Rama, loving spouse, Bound to her lord by well kept vows? And Lakshman's mother too, the dame Sumitra skilled in duty's claim, Who brave Satrughna also bare, Second in age,—her health declare. And she, in self-conceit most sage, With selfish heart most prone to rage, My mother, fares she well? has she Sent message or ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... tone of the company they keep, he thought it of essential consequence that on their entrance into the world they should see the best models. "No company or good company," was his maxim. By good he did not mean fine. Airs and conceit he despised, as much as he disliked vulgarity. Affectation was under awe before him from an instinctive perception of his powers of ridicule. He could not endure, in favour of any pretensions of birth, fortune, or fashion, the stupidity of a formal circle, or the inanity ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... write regularly for the Mercury, of course, I sha'n't have time. But sometimes I throw off a pearl (there is no self-conceit about that, I beg you to observe) which ought for the eternal welfare of my race to have a more extensive circulation than is afforded by a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... embodied in all creeds three human impulses: fear, conceit, and hatred; and religion has given an air of respectability to these passions. Religion is a malignant disease born of fear, a cancer which has been eating into the vitals of everything that is worth while in our civilization; ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... a large group. Dodge it as you will, the lecture is and will continue to be an unsatisfactory, even vicious, way of attempting to teach social science. No reputable university tries to teach economics or politics nowadays in huge lecture sections. Only an abnormal conceit or abysmal poverty will prevent sociology departments from doing likewise. Remember that education is always an exchange, never a ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the only antidote, the truth! It was not his part to judge of consequences so long as a duty remained to be done! and what could be more a duty than to undeceive where he had deceived, especially where the deception was aggravating that worst of diseases, self-conceit, self-satisfaction, self-worship? It was doubtful whether she would read what he might write; but the fact that she did not trust him, that, notwithstanding his assurance, she would still be in fear of how he might depreciate her work in the eyes of the public, would, he ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... wanted to fling a decanter at my head! It was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after an interview with me, exclaimed (the circumstance is historical), "I don't like that young man; he talked to me as if he was God Almighty, or Lord Byron!" But in sober truth, I never had the sort of conceit with which men credited me; I merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the Literary Life. I think still that, as a rule, the profession of letters narrows the sympathy and warps the intelligence. When I saw the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... show, and advance themselves that way than any other: as, namely, those three notorious discoursing heads, Bibiena, Machiavel, and Aretino did (to let Bembo and Ariosto pass) with the great admiration and wonderment of the whole country: being indeed reputed matchable in all points, both for conceit of wit and eloquent deciphering of matters, either with Aristophanes and Menander in Greek, or with Plautus and Terence in Latin, or with any other in any other tongue. But I will not stand greatly with you in your own matters. If ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... however, the glow of tender feeling in self-love. The projection of the self-interest to others has a passion, a melting in it that self-love never seems to possess, though it may be constant and ever-operating. Self-regard, self-admiration or conceit may be very high and deeply felt, but though more common than real admiration for others, it seldom reaches the awe and reverence that the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... conceit as he ran—the same fearless laugh with which he sent Mrs. Ingham-Baker down the gangway to her death. He paused, saw Luke and Agatha standing together ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... the opportunity. One must have youth to enjoy Italy thoroughly. The desire to go becomes less and less as one grows older. Besides, it completes every man's education; it broadens his charity and smooths down the rough edges of his conceit. I'll put the proposition in a way you can't possibly get round. You've simply got to go. You will always have that thousand, so don't worry about that. You have twenty-five hundred on hand, you say. With that you can ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... why upon the road. "And all alone?" "You see I freeze," says Truth, "And yet of those who pass I but implore A simple shelter, but I frighten them. Alas! I see an aged woman gains But small consideration!" "Younger than I," Saith Fable, "are you? Yet I may aver, Without conceit, that everywhere I am received with joy. But Mistress Truth, Why did you brave the light in such scant robe? 'Twas most ill-judged. Come, let's arrange for both, Since the same end is aim for me as you; Get 'neath my cloak, and we'll together walk. Thus, for your sake, ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... it serve to cook a pot of mojadderah. In this extraordinary and outrageous manner, barbarously capricious, he would baptise the ideal in the fire of the real. And thus, glowing with health and confidence and conceit, he enters another Park from which he escapes in the end, sad and wan and bankrupt. Of a truth, many attractions and distractions are here; else he could not forget the peddling-box and the light-heeled, heavy-haunched women of Battery Park. Here are ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... indeed, which, in its highest Stages, is a kind of spiritual Madness, may have on some Minds a quite different Effect; and the Poor Soul, that is subject to this gloomy and tyrannical Principle, may conceit strange things; it may at one Time imagine itself under the Guilt of Adam's Sin, which it never committed; and fancy itself a Saint in Jesus Christ (and what not) at another: it is a mad Principle, fruitful of ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... ostriches have such tiny wings, and that one and all have this peculiar mark on their breasts. Never, from that time to this, has any ostrich been able to fly. But even this has not entirely subdued their pride and arrogance, and their insufferable conceit. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... me the sinister effect of which the poets speak, who find in the contrasts of life the mockery of death. I looked upon the frivolous idea, if it was serious and not a simple antithesis made in pleasantry, as the conceit of a heart that has known no real experience. The gambler who leaves the table at break of day, his eyes burning and hands empty, may feel that he is at war with nature, like the torch at some hideous vigil; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... think it will do very well on the whole. I am not perfectly sure that the laundress will be satisfied with the arrangement of the laundry, and I don't see exactly, Fred, what you are to do for a dressing-room, when we have more than one visitor. I am out of conceit with the tinting of the drawing-room ceiling, and—and several of the mantelpieces are hideous. But, on the other hand, the dining-room is perfectly lovely, there is no end of closet-room, and the kitchen is a gem. Oh, thank ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... to the tenant a certain mode of cultivation, and a certain succession of crops, during the whole continuance of the lease. This condition, which is generally the effect of the landlord's conceit of his own superior knowledge (a conceit in most cases very ill-founded), ought always to be considered as an additional rent, as a rent in service, instead of a rent in money. In order to discourage the practice, which is generally a foolish ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... she marries him. Thats been going on for two months now; and whats the result? Youve got yourself thoroughly disliked in the office; and youre getting yourself thoroughly disliked here, all through your bad manners and your conceit, and the damned ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... flows into the Peneus, passing by Pharsalus in its course. This alludes to the battle of Dyrrachium, where Pompey was successful for a moment, only to revive in his party that vain confidence and shallow conceit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... devil and old serpent, who also converted Adam and Eve into enthusiasts, and led them from the outward Word of God to spiritualizing and self-conceit, and nevertheless he accomplished this through other outward words. Just as also our enthusiasts [at the present day] condemn the outward Word, and nevertheless they themselves are not silent, but they fill the world with their pratings and writings, as though, indeed, the ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... mean time taken place, caused the desired effect; in so much, that, on the Thursday, there was a great congregation of the male portion of the people. At the which, old Mr Dravel—a genteel man he was, well read in matters of history, though somewhat over-portioned with a conceit of himself—got up on the table, in one of the table-seats forenent the poopit, and made a speech suitable to the occasion; in the which he set forth what manful things had been done of old by the Greeks and the Romans for their country, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... been to hide away in the rear rather than rush to the front, unless, indeed, forced forward by duty, when I can be bold enough, if need be; and that one defect in me all know to be a dislike to any assumption of dignity—surely a feeling the opposite to self-conceit; whilst, if I am not true, simple, and sincere, I am worse than I hope I am, and all my friends are deceived in their kind ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... forgotten, however, that Mr. Johnson's course was marked by the inherent qualities of his mind. He had two signal defects, either of which would impair his fitness for Executive duty; united they rendered him incapable of efficient administration:—he was conceited and he was obstinate. Conceit without obstinacy may be overcome by the advice of judicious counselors; united with obstinacy it carries its possessor beyond the bounds of prudence, almost beyond the control of reason. Obstinacy united with good judgment ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... have nothing bad to say of 'this Petrea,' as one of the friends of the house still calls her, but no longer in anger. This Petrea has had all kind of botherations in the world: in the first place with her own nose, with which she could not get into conceit, and then with various other things, as well within her as without her, and for a long time it seemed as if her own world would never come forth out ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... "Don't flatter these conceit-drugged travesties on the male sex by caring about anything they say," she tells him. "You have so many things they never will have! Why, you're a big, clean, two-handed man and—" She breaks off and gives a giggle that I would have took Verdun for. "But there!" she ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man whose affectations and assumptions are a proverb, has lost the magnificent virtue of simplicity, for no other ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... once remarked, a "God-made" gentleman, untainted with the slightest approach to any thing like affectation or coxcombry: indeed he ridiculed the latter with much comic effect: and the words "Dandy Jack," would put him out of conceit with any article of apparel that drew forth the remark. He would answer the taunt with a face of grave rebuke, saying, "Bad Mam, bold Mam; Jack dandy? no; Jack poor boy." He had not, indeed, arrived at so copious ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... it or think it? Not she. He knew her. And if his knowledge had brought much misery, it brought consolation too. Where Lucia was concerned he had never been sustained by any personal conceit; he had never walked vainly in the illusion of her love. At that supreme point his imagination had utterly broken down; he had never won from it a moment's respite from his intolerable lucidity. There ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the rules of Parliamentary law which Dr. Kitchell tried to teach them. She was on her feet, moving to the front, talking as she went. "I really haven't the self-assertion to walk up to strange students and tell them the error of their ways. To me, that course of action savors too much of conceit of our own virtues. The best we can do is to be perfectly honorable about the examinations. Our mental attitude toward dishonorable proceedings ought to have its influence without our going about making ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... if I'd seen Him why couldn't I still remember Him? Why couldn't I consider the millions of years that go to the making of man and do my little bit and wait on His will? Because my temptation came on me. I was tempted in the wilderness of my own credulity and conceit. For I looked back over time past and I said like Solomon—I don't know whether he ever said it, but he's the most blase Johnnie I remember—'All is vanity.' As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God. We are made rather grotesquely ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... circumstance of his back being toward the light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... ceaseless irritation; of all objectionable types of humanity, this loafing and boozing degenerate was, to Miss Rodney, perhaps the least endurable; his mere countenance excited her animosity, for feebleness and conceit, things abhorrent to her, were legible in every line of the trivial features; and a full moustache, evidently subjected to training, served only as emphasis of foppish imbecility. 'I could beat him!' she exclaimed more than once within herself, overcome with contemptuous wrath, when she ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... obstinacy and conceit," said Lord Marney. "I took you to Mowbray Castle, and the cards were in your own hands if you ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... the house of salvation; We shall find him, in that place, That shall us comfort, by God's grace. Lo! this is Confession; kneel down and ask mercy, For he is in good conceit with God Almighty. ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... chaplain had dreamed that such a day he should die; but being by all the family laughed out of the belief of it, he had almost forgot it, till the evening before at supper; there being thirteen at table, according to an old conceit that one of the family must soon die; one of the young ladies pointed to him, that he was the person. Upon this the chaplain recalling to mind his dream, fell into some disorder, and the lady Ware reproving him for his superstition, he said, he ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... continued to bombard the Item with verses. They were invariably accepted, but when he sent to a New York magazine a poem which he considered a gem, the promptness with which it was returned staggered his conceit and was in that respect a good thing ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... separate from reason, and the same in all the human race, it is not meant to be denied that the mere opinions as to the nature and condition of that existence may have no other foundation whatever than what Mr Hume, for instance, has ascribed erroneously to the notion itself—men's own conceit and imagination. This in fact is the secret of that writer's vile sophistry on the subject, and at once confutes it, by proving the inapplicability of his argument. All that is now contended for, is, the universality of the notion or belief, not by any means the similarity of the opinions ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the democratical conceit of them that say that the Parliament hath their governing power, as they are the people's representatives, and so have the members of the convocation, though those represented have no governing power ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... side, and be respectful. Of course it is only Pretend, you know," she added, with a quick consciousness of Frere's conceit. "Now then, the Queen goes down to the Seashore surrounded by her Nymphs! There is no occasion to laugh, Mr. Frere. Of course, Nymphs are very different from you, but then ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... clearly, there being little foolish conceit in the man's makeup, that he was not worthy. And he understood, though vaguely at first, that it must be his one object now to become as worthy as any man could be of her. And when the fifth day came and Ruf Ettinger rode to the Bar L-M with excitement dancing in his eyes and ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... to check by ever so little the class-conceit of those people who think that they can manage the poor man's life better than he can himself; who would take advantage of their education to play ducks and drakes with his personal affairs. For it is my firm belief that in the present phase ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... always detected. Great genius and force of character undoubtedly make their own career. But because Walter Scott was dull at school, is a parent to see with joy that his son is a dunce? Because Lord Chatham was of a towering conceit, must we infer that pompous vanity portends a comprehensive statesmanship that will fill the world with the splendor of its triumphs? Because Sir Robert Walpole gambled and swore and boozed at Houghton, are we to suppose that ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... brings in its train. The whole countryside enjoys a wholesome tonic by the frequent visits of the hounds, and the well-equipped company with them. Nothing cheers up the village, or cures the influenza, or brings oblivion of war news, or puts every one into conceit with themselves, so quickly, or leaves such a glow of sound satisfaction behind it. It would be odd if it did not, considering the amount of time, money, and trouble spent before the pack trots up to the green before the old grey church ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... very great,—never so great, perhaps, as now and here,—and these people assemble every week to converse upon them. What more rational thing could they do? If they came together to snivel and cant, and to support one another in a miserable conceit of being the elect of the human species, we might object. But no description can show how far from that, how opposite to that, is the tone, the spirit, the object, of the Friday-evening ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... wild and barren a region as it is generally represented by modern writers. The two chiefs had a personal altercation at the council table, and O'Neill so far lost his temper as to snatch a paper out of the hand of O'Cahan. Whereupon Sir John Davis remarked: 'I rest assured, in my own conceit, that I shall live to see Ulster the best reformed province in this kingdom; and as for yourself, my lord, I hope to live to see you the best reformed subject in Ireland.' To this the haughty chief replied with warmth, that he hoped 'the attorney-general would never see the day when injustice ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... not a little in making, what he called, poetry of his own; for, of course, our little hero was a poet. All the common usages of life, all the ways of the world, and all the customs of society, seemed to be quite unknown to him; add to these good qualities, a magnificent conceit, a cowardice inconceivable, and a face so irresistibly comic, that every one who first beheld it was compelled to burst out a-laughing, and you will have some notion of this strange little gentleman. He was very proud ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... institution of our club, Sir Joshua Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. 'I like it much, (said he,) I think I shall be of you.' When Sir Joshua mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased with the actor's conceit. 'He'll be of us, (said Johnson) how does he know we will permit him? The first Duke in England has no right to hold such language.' However, when Garrick was regularly proposed some time afterwards, Johnson, though he had taken a momentary offence at his arrogance, warmly and kindly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the funniest, most attractive as well as the vainest character of the Comedie Humaine; he, the original, as unbearable in private life as he was delightful in his writings; the big baby swollen with genius and conceit, who had so many qualities and so many failings that one feared to attack the latter for fear of injuring the former, and thus spoiling this ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... is related of these invasions, which might deserve our notice, were it not justly to be suspected as the fanciful conceit of a recent sophist. We are told, that in the sack of Athens the Goths had collected all the libraries, and were on the point of setting fire to this funeral pile of Grecian learning, had not one of their chiefs, of more refined ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... extended towards the grate. "No," said K—— quietly unfolding the other from beneath the chair, and showing it, "that's worse." By which you may learn the fact—that every man puts his best leg foremost. But we must not quit our friend Gerard yet. I like his grave conceit. I rejoice to find him giving the painters a rap over their knuckles. He says, Eusebius, that they are fond of having "smutty pictures" in their rooms; and roundly tells them, that though fine pictures are necessary, there is no need of their having such subjects as "Mars and Venus, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... mattered very little, although the waves were much higher than I had seen them in the North Sea, but poor Esdale suffered very much, and Horner's conceit was taken down a good many pegs. Jim and I did our best to look after them, and to try to get them to eat something, but ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... leads to a certain conclusion, which the simpleton of a writer has been quite innocent of suspecting from the beginning to the end. Of that conclusion I am so sure that I will forfeit my place if it does not turn out that Mrs. Yatman has been practicing upon the folly and conceit of this young man, and that she has tried to shield herself from discovery by purposely encouraging him to suspect the wrong persons. I tell you that confidently; and I will even go further. I will undertake to give a decided opinion as to why Mrs. ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... objection. His face at once assumed a different expression, his features wearing a mingled air of impudence, conceit, and irony. He caught up a ruler that was lying on the magistrate's desk, and, flourishing it wildly, began as follows, in a shrill falsetto voice: "Silence, music! And you, big drum, hold your peace! Now is the hour, now is the moment, ladies and gentlemen, to witness the grand, unique performance ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the greatest pains in his instruction. Before the end of her Freshman year she twice succeeded in getting through his guard and landing a thrust on his well-rounded figure; and though to keep down her conceit he told her that he must be losing, along with his slenderness, some of his youthful agility, he confessed to his wife that teaching Miss Marshall was the best fun he had had in years. The girl was as quick as a cat, and had a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... elevated from a trivial scene. He is borne upward to the harmony of the sphere. He bows before the great law of the universe—the young gallant is transformed into the mighty teacher; and this without one hard conceit —without one touch of pedantry. It is but a flash of light; and where glowed the playful picture shines ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... jealousy, mademoiselle. The tall Swede knows how to take down your pride and bring you to a proper sense of your false conceit of the beauty and wit of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... if hazing has lived nearly seventy years at Annapolis, then it's because hazing is a good thing for the seedling Naval officer. I believe in hazing. I believe in being forced to respect and obey my elders. I believe in a fellow having every grain of conceit driven out of him by heroic measures. And that's hazing—long may the practice ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... the Birds, amid loud clapping of hands, with considerable haughtiness. To say the truth, there was no love lost between the cannibal god and his European subordinate. The savage, puffed up as he was in his own conceit, had nevertheless always an uncomfortable sense that, in his heart of hearts, the impassive Frenchman had but a low opinion of him. So he invariably tried to make up by the solemnity of his manner and the loudness of his assertions ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... complain if I remind you of the tropics this dreary winter night; so I'll bear out your fanciful conceit. Your face, a moment since, was like a burst ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... enters a room she seems to charge it with electricity. You see no one else and you are impatient when others insist upon talking. Vitality, an immense intelligence without arrogance or self-conceit, a courtesy which has no relation to diplomatic caution, a kindly tact and an unmistakable integrity, combine to make Madame Waddington one of the most popular ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... (1626) did William Lawson, in "A New Orchard and Garden," set forth the rationale of the practice in his Chapter X, "On Grafting," in this wise: "Now are we come to the most curious point of our faculty: curious in conceit, but indeed as plaine and easie as the rest, when it is plainly shewne, which we commonly call Graffing, or (after some) Grafting. I cannot Etymoligize, nor shew the original of the word, except it come of graving and carving. But ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... out of my comprehension, or indeed I think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and subtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal conceit or turn of wit. The mind is known to attain, in certain conditions of trance, a quickness so extraordinary that we are compelled at times to imagine a condition of unendurable intellectual intensity, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... only a panegyric upon the victory, but, if need be, a funeral elegy upon the Duke, wherein, after they have crowned his valour with many laurels, they will at last deplore the odds under which he fell, concluding that his courage deserved a better destiny. All the company smiled at the conceit of Lisideius; but Crites, more eager than before, began to make particular exceptions against some writers, and said the public magistrates ought to send betimes to forbid them; and that it concerned the peace and quiet of all honest people that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... "disgust," a prosaic word which seems to mar a fine stanza, Byron does not mean "distaste," aversion from the nauseous, but "tastelessness," the inability to enjoy taste. Compare the French "Avoir du degout pour la vie," "To be out of conceit with life." Byron was "a lover of Nature," but it was seldom that he felt her "healing power," or was able to lose himself in his surroundings. But now, for the moment, he experiences that sudden uplifting of the spirit in the presence of natural ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... to me. How could a child like you read the Bible? It is a book for bishops and archbishops, and the Immaculate Father himself. What an arrogance? What an insolence of self-conceit must possess so young a heart? Saints of ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... he had the advantage of a quick imagination and a sanguine temperament; also the manly courage to look at Fortune with respectful recognition, as we all look at royalty,—even as though he had sometime been presented,—not with a snobbish conceit which would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd; Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... overwhelmed by the first full view of the extent of the injuries he had inflicted, the first perception that pride and malevolence had been the true source of his prejudice and misconceptions, and for the first time conscious of the long-fostered conceit that had been his bane from boyhood. All had flashed on him with the discovery of the true purpose of the demand which he thought had justified his persecution. He saw the glory of Guy's character and the part he had acted,—the scales ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gewgaws of all kinds; and 'twas the young gentleman that hawked his wares himself. "What d'ye lack?" he kept shouting, and would stop to unfold his merchandise, holding up now a book, and now a silk doublet, and running over their merits like any huckster—but with the merriest conceit in ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... know wot you calls a fast-coach, but if you've a mind to make a match, I'll bet you a hat, ay, or half a dozen hats, that I'll find a fellow to take the conceit out ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... arise on Earth, With chearful Wisdom and instructive Mirth, See motley Life in modern Trappings dress'd, And feed with varied Fools th' eternal Jest: Thou who couldst laugh where Want enchain'd Caprice, Toil crush'd Conceit, and Man was of a Piece; Where Wealth unlov'd without a Mourner dy'd; And scarce a Sycophant was fed by Pride; Where ne'er was known the Form of mock Debate, Or seen a new-made Mayor's unwieldy ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... or less conceited. Elihu's conceit was as to his scientific knowledge on the subject of cows and horses and their diseases. He spoke so confidently that Mr. Walton did ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... indignation and scathing rebuke, as he warmed with the subject of Southern delusion, actuated by unprincipled leaders, and few of the Senators who sat on the Democratic side escaped from his truly formidable denunciation. Lane, of Oregon, a compound of conceit, ridiculous ignorance, and servility to Southern masters, was totally annihilated by the sturdy Tennesseean, for his imbecile attempts to excuse his pusillanimous submission to his chivalrous dictators. So successful was he in conjecturing and exposing the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you to write," said the Ink-stand. "It was a hit at you for your conceit. Strange that you cannot see that people make a fool of you! I gave you that hit pretty cleverly. I confess, though, it ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... the news of the completion of the road being flashed abroad as it fell. Then the two locomotives, one from the west and the other from the east, drew up to each other on the single line, coming into gentle collision, that they in their way, in the pleasing conceit of their drivers, might symbolise the fraternisation that went on. It does not spoil the story of the ceremony to state that the laurel tie, with its inscriptions and its magnificent mountings, was only formally laid, and that it became from that day a relic to ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... said his father, "take yourself off, it you cannot maintain civility. And your mother does not like fishing-tackle at the breakfast-table go! I believe," he said as Ransom bounded away, "I believe conceit is the normal ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... I would ask you to accompany me to one of the temples, that known as the Temple of the Horse, being, perhaps, the best. It is rather a long distance by foot, but Englishmen, at least according to Japanese ideas, have too much money to walk when they can ride, so to keep up the national conceit, but more for our own convenience, we jump into an elegant little carriage, or "jin-riki-sha," literally "man-power-carriage," but in sailor phrase "johnny-ring-shaw," or short "ring shaw." Away we go, a dozen or more in a line, over the creek ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... with the works of man's hands than with those of God; their occupations, too, which are simple, and requiring less of ingenuity and skill than those which engage the attention of the other portion of their fellow-creatures, are less favourable to the engendering of self-conceit and sufficiency so utterly at variance with that lowliness of spirit which constitutes the best foundation of piety. The sneerers and scoffers at religion do not spring from amongst the simple children of nature, but are the excrescences of overwrought refinement, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... much shocked to learn that we are not popular on the Continent. Such a discovery comes to either a nation or an individual like a douche of cold water on nice, warm conceit, and brings with it a feeling of discouragement, of being unjustly treated, that is painful, for we are very “touchy” in America, and cry out when a foreigner expresses anything but admiration for our ways, yet we are the last to ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... studies—"Soubrette," "Lover," "Witch," "Clown," "Villain," "Sweetheart"—besides two additions: a "Prologue" and "Epilogue." Here MacDowell is in one of his happiest moods. It was a fortunate and charming conceit which prompted the plan of the series, with its half-playful, half-ironic, yet lurkingly poetic suggestions; for in spite of the mood of bantering gaiety which placed the pieces in such mocking juxtaposition, there is, throughout, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... a knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... and its consequences gave me a happy excuse for keeping on this fellow's trail while he was busy perfecting the machinery for Perry's destruction. The man's self-assurance, his conceit——" ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... wholly different ground from the Bible. If it merely gratifies curiosity or enlivens pastime, if it awakens emotion without directing it to useful ends, if it rallies the infirmities of human nature with no other design than to provoke our derision or increase our conceit, it shoots very, very wide of the object which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... him; we thought him conceited, self-opinionated, selfish, and untrustworthy. But later, reflecting that this was possibly the result of Captain Jim's over-praise, and finding none of these qualities as yet offensively opposed to our own selfishness and conceit, we were induced, like many others, to forget our first impressions. We could easily correct him if he attempted to impose upon US, as he evidently had upon Captain Jim. Believing, after the fashion of most humanity, that there was something about US particularly awe-inspiring and ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... world. We, of the proud West, are prone to think that our type of life is all-embracing and that our religious thought is all-satisfying. Nothing can be more fallacious or more injurious than such a conceit. The East is the full complement of the West. In life and thought we are only an hemisphere, and we need the East to fill up our full-orbed beauty. The mystic piety of India will correct our too practical, mundane view of things. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... thankes. Mr Downes (Iheare) is sent for home by his father w{i}th an intent to keepe him w{i}th him, but I doe imagine that when my coson Hunton shall be other where disposed off, he shall returne; for my conceit is stronge that the feare of his beinge match'd to his disadvantage, who was placed w{i}th Mr Evelyn a youth to be bred for his p{re}ferment, hath caused this alteration; howsoever there be noe wordes made of it. Iconfess that when I have bin told of the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... difference of Wit; which is not only against reason; but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish, that had not rather governe themselves, than be governed by others: Nor when the wise in their own conceit, contend by force, with them who distrust their owne wisdome, do they alwaies, or often, or almost at any time, get the Victory. If Nature therefore have made men equall, that equalitie is to be acknowledged; or if Nature have made ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... he received his master's commands to admit the holy man immediately; and, having previously manned the entrance to guard against surprise, he obeyed, without further scruple, the commands which he had received. The harebrained self-conceit which had emboldened Wamba to undertake this dangerous office, was scarce sufficient to support him when he found himself in the presence of a man so dreadful, and so much dreaded, as Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, and he brought out his "pax vobiscum", to which he, in ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... fear they could not shorten canvas. His fame spread until it was considered an honour to look upon him, much less to know him. He became the object of adoration, and perhaps his knowledge of this swelled his conceit, so that he came to believe that even the shooting of his seamen was not a murderous, but a permissible act, so far as he was concerned. But this man was only one among scores ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... past and present flattered Rafael's conceit, though, in the background of his thoughts, the suspicion lurked that his mother had been not a little instrumental in the preparation of his noisy reception, not to mention don Andres, and numerous other friends, ever loyal to anyone ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the frontier, they have all been free from war and its havoc ever since the year 1700. In our year of grace 64, although the throne is occupied by a vicious emperor suffering from megalomania and enormous self-conceit, the empire is in full ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... ideals—would never lower them—he could honour and reverence her. If she, like him, could change, and accept selfishly that which she would scorn in another, she would not be the splendid creature she was. And yet—without conceit or vanity—Truedale believed that Lynda felt for him what he ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" "I shall like no laughing," said Feeble-mind; "I shall like no gay attire; I shall like no unprofitable questions." I think it took some self-conceit to refuse to sit at table beside Christiana because of her gay attire. And I hope Mercy did not give up dressing well, even after she was married, to please that weak-minded old churl. And as to unprofitable ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the sentence might have pursued a bolder course without untruth or necessary complications. Perhaps my conceit was on a scale with my acknowledged infirmity where Catherine was concerned. But I did think that there was more than trust in the eyes that now melted into mine; there was liking at least, and gratitude enough to inspire one to win infinitely more. I went so far as to take in mine the hand ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... none, nor all combined, can stay the hand of God. "He doeth according to His will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth." He can initiate, permit, modify, and destroy. Once we truly recognise the sovereignty of God over us, conceit will lie dead ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... occasion—I forget what—to step into the courtyard as I settled this account; and remember I walked down-stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning. Beshrew the somber pencil, said I vauntingly, for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a coloring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened: reduce them to their proper ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... beneath the pines, When the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... following: "The moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than resign the beliefs she had struggled to ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... disturb his conceit. To-night we sleep on deck, the starboard side. At five o'clock we have to get up and go inside again so they can holystone the deck. And I am always soundest asleep at that time. Doubtless, I shall be ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... and Mr. Dunbar Barton is decidedly popular. But this Arnold Forster—with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—is intolerable and hateful. He never gets up without making one angry. There is no man whose genius would entitle him to half the arrogant self-conceit of this young member. Acrid, venomous, rasping, he injures his own cause by the very excess of his gall and by the exuberance of his pretension. He also saw that the riots would do no good, and he hinted ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... dressed, seemed to tell something under twenty years and had a handsome wistful face atop of a heavy, lumbering, almost corpulent figure, which however did not betoken inactivity; for David's purple hat (a conceit of his mother's of which we were both heartily ashamed) blowing off as we neared him he leapt the railings without touching them and was back with it in three seconds; only instead of delivering it straightway he seemed to expect David to chase him ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... was, or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank; because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke—out of the impulse and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it. For as to self-conceit, that could not receive food from flattery, since to this hour, not half a dozen people in the world know that I have ever ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Henry: "the Isle of Wight is, in my opinion, more retired; Southampton more select; Tunbridge Wells more rural; and Worthing more social."—"True, D'Almaine; but I am not yet so old and woe-begone, so out of conceit with myself, or misanthropic with the world, to choose either the retired, the select, the rural, or the social. I love the bustle of society, enjoy the promenade on the Steyne, and the varied character that nightly fills the libraries; I read men, not books, and above all ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... must feel out of conceit with me," laughed Mlle. Nadiboff to Hal. "He prefers the chauffeur's company to mine. So we must ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... simpletons enough, just like them, fighting and dying for they know not what, and fancying that posterity will take the trouble to put laurel wreaths on their rusty and battered helmets. Could you help smiling, Prince Jason, to see the self-conceit of that last fellow, just as ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... first person, contradictory alike to Ingersoll's, to Kirkham's, and to Murray's; while all are wrong, and this among the rest. The word should indeed be we, and not us; because we have both analogy and good authority for the former case, and nothing but the false conceit of sundry grammatists for the latter. But it is a nominative absolute, like any other nominative which we use in the same exclamatory manner. For the first person may just as well be put in the nominative ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "O emanation of your father, you had also better have slept than that you should thus calumniate the failings of mankind.—The braggart can discern only his own precious person; he will draw the veil of conceit all around him. Were fortune to bestow upon him God's all-searching eye, he would find ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... and which will be lost at sea. Happy the State, happy the family, which is guided by the counsels of so profound a man! And what but mischief, public and private, can we expect from the temerity and conceit of scolists who know no more about the heavenly bodies than what they have learned from Sir John Herschel's beautiful little volume. But, to speak seriously, is not a little truth better than a great deal of falsehood? Is not the man who, in the evenings of a fortnight, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... year. The exuberant enthusiasm of youth was couched in poetic imagery which has from time immemorial been employed in panegyrics of great poets. The beautiful figure which presents a great man's work as his only lasting monument is as old as poetry itself. The conceit courses through the classical poetry of Greece from the time of Pindar, and through that of Italy from the time of Ennius. No great Renaissance writer of modern Italy, of sixteenth-century France, or of Elizabethan ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... in the huts that night there was noise as of bees about to swarm. No man slept. Men flitted like ghosts from hut to hut—not too openly, nor without sufficient evidence of stealth to keep the guards in good conceit of themselves, but freely for all that. What the men of one hut said the men of the next hut knew within five minutes, and so ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... with the sort of Director whom you prefer! What do you mean by it, what do you mean by it? Were others to regard things in the same way, the Service would find itself without a single individual. Reconsider your conduct—forego your pride and conceit, and make ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... other it was so, and from that time Paw and Maw, and Seth and Masters, and even YOU and ME, dear, had nothing else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth's sneaking rages, and Uncle Ben's sneaking fooleries, and Masters's sneaking conceit, but only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and Masters trifle—and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were satisfied, and we ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... wounding to his vanity and self-conceit than the reproaches, well founded though they were, to which he had been obliged to ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... at all surprised at what in this country is most foolishly called the conceit and vanity of the Americans. What people in the world have so fine, so magnificent a country? Besides that, they have some reason to be proud of themselves. We have given the chief features of their eastern ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... it was you, Merytra. Being a mass of self-conceit, he thought that you ran away because he had banished you from his royal ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... determination and stubborn common-sense, and Pliable with his shallow impressionableness, are among our acquaintances. We have, before now, come across "the brisk lad Ignorance from the town of Conceit," and have made acquaintance with Mercy's would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk, "a man of some breeding and that pretended to religion, but who stuck very close to the world." The man Temporary who lived in a town two miles ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... with her stories that the king seeks their continuance night after night; thus she wards off her fate for nearly three years. At the end of that time she has borne the king three male children; and has, by the sprightliness of her mind, gradually drawn all the conceit out of him, so that his land is at rest. The tales told within this frame may be divided into: (a) Histories, or long romances, which are often founded upon historical facts; (b) Anecdotes and short stories, which deal largely with the caliphs of the house ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the fifth month my plumage was something wonderful to behold for beauty. As for my head being large, it now helped to show off the splendid yellow crest; and the awkward look was quite gone. Still my temper hadn't improved; indeed I think it was worse, for conceit was added to my other bad qualities; and when I would have liked to be amiable and join the merry flock of cockatoos that lived in the trees near us, they would have nothing to say to me. My mother used often to moan and vex herself about me, and she did her best to keep as near me ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... that actually sinneth, or omitteth his Duty. Enthusiasm indeed, which, in its highest Stages, is a kind of spiritual Madness, may have on some Minds a quite different Effect; and the Poor Soul, that is subject to this gloomy and tyrannical Principle, may conceit strange things; it may at one Time imagine itself under the Guilt of Adam's Sin, which it never committed; and fancy itself a Saint in Jesus Christ (and what not) at another: it is a mad Principle, fruitful of false Doctrines, Chimeras, and Monsters. It matters not whether (as in the Case ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... blind, and needs reason to discern for it what is good and what is not, reason to direct its affections into their legitimate channels. But the heart may refuse to be thus controlled, swayed by the whisperings of ignorant pride and conceit; or it may be unable to receive the impulse of the reason on account of the unhealthy fumes that arise from a too exuberant animal nature unchastened by self-denial. Then it is that, free to act as it lists, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... young mulatto of about twenty who got the insane idea into his head that he should stand for his rights. And he did have the right of it, too; but that didn't help him any. He lived on the topmost gallery. Eight hall-men took the conceit out of him in just about a minute and a half—for that was the length of time required to travel along his gallery to the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He travelled the whole distance on every portion of his anatomy except ...
— The Road • Jack London
... been, and still continues for the season, severer than ever was recollected by the oldest stagers, and has rather put our Halifax friends out of conceit with the fine climate of Canada, particularly as Lady Prevost's health is delicate, and she is very sensible of cold. Mrs. Cator and Mrs. Baynes beg to be most kindly remembered to you. General Bowes accompanied Kempt to Portugal in the end ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... understand great truths,—and great truths are seldom popular,—one must bring a willing mind. Yet how often it is that the very sick one wishes most to help are the ones who refuse, either from conceit or stupidity, to believe and be healed. Remember this: no one can get out of a book more than he brings to it. Readers of books seldom realise that by their written or spoken criticisms they are displaying themselves in all their ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... quite absorbed in the thought that a live man pays her certain attentions, and she takes his conceit for grave wisdom, and his kindness for infinite tenderness. She looks upon him as an importation from the priesthood of the Grand Llama,—perhaps he is the Grand Llama himself; certainly the inhabitant ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... to do something great and noble to show his devotion. Dragons was the thing he had in mind, though he may not have been aware of it. Dragons also, no doubt, flitted through Mivanway's brain, but unfortunately for lovers the supply of dragons has lapsed. Mivanway, liking the conceit, however, thought over it, and then decided that Charles must give up smoking. She had discussed the matter with her favourite sister, and that was the only thing the girls could think of. Charles's face fell. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Church; counting all things holy that were therein contained, and especially, the priest and clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed, because they were the servants, as I then thought,[49] of God, and were principal in the holy temple, to do his work therein. This conceit grew so strong in little time upon my spirit, that had I but seen a priest, though never so sordid and debauched in his life,[50] I should find my spirit fall under him, reverence him, and knit ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... thus, as in the case of Byron, be burnt out of the young man by the egotism of passion; but it may also be frozen up in his breast by the egotism of opinion. Woe to the young shoulders afflicted with the conceit that they support old heads! When this mental disease assumes the form of flippancy, it renders a young person happily unconscious that Nature has any stores of wisdom which she has not thought fit to deposit in his cranium, or that his mind can properly assume any other attitude towards an opponent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... as good a man!" He laughed shortly. "Conceit, no doubt, Miss Crawford, but none the less I really do fancy that a Conniston is as good as the sort of men I have been ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... cried; "a principle that would fill the sky, as vast as space; and ignorant, careless, of me, it was moving to its own end. And that—do you see, Daniel?—had grown destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms! We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... forbear and waver as I would, I faced the great Decision. My life's last and greatest door stood ajar. What with all my dreaming, studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight? Despite all my youthful conceit and bumptiousness, I found developed beneath it all a reticence and new fear of forwardness, which sprang from searching criticisms of motive and high ideals of efficiency; but contrary to my dream of racial solidarity and notwithstanding my deep desire to serve and follow ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... seen in her society; and I had pleasure and pride in the fact. I knew that I resembled her in some respects, but I was never coxcomb enough to imagine I had half her good-looks, even allowing for difference of sex. My own conceit, so far as I then had any—plenty of it came, a year or two later—but my own conceit, in 1797, rather ran in the direction of my athletic properties, physical force, which was unusually great for sixteen, and stature. As for Rupert, I would not have exchanged ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... absurd," said Rosalind Merton, sidling up to Maggie and casting some disdainful glances at poor Priscilla, "the conceit of some people! Of all forms of conceit, preserve me from ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... men into that sleep? What makes them do in one minute something which curses all their lives afterwards? Love of pleasure? Yes: that is a common curse enough, as we all know. But a worse snare than even that is pride and self-conceit. That was what ruined those old Jews. That was what blinded their eyes. They had made up their minds that they saw; therefore they were blind: that they could not go wrong; therefore they went utterly and horribly wrong thenceforth: that they alone of all ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... slip. Then, too, by Farwell's advice, old Jerry was growing rigid along financial lines, and at last the States took definite shape in Jerry-Jo's mind, but he meant to have Priscilla before he heeded the lure. With all his brazen conceit and daring he intuitively knew that the girl had never thought of him as he thought of her, and he dared not awaken her by legitimate means. Quite in keeping with his unrestrained nature, he plotted, indirectly, to secure what otherwise might escape him. Fully realizing Nathaniel's attitude toward ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... had not been for the indifference with which she was treated in her home, the favour with which she was regarded abroad would have been most prejudicial to Jasmine; but any conceit which might have been engendered in the school-house was speedily counteracted when she got within the portals of the colonel's domain. Coming into the presence of her father and his wife, with all the incense of kindness, affection, and, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... hobbies was education, or, as she phrased it, the "fetchin' up" of children, which she held should be performed to the letter of the old stiff rule. In this manner she had already trained up six sons, who were all following their fortunes upon the seas, and, on this account, she had no small conceit of her abilities; and when she thought she discerned a lamb being left to frisk heedlessly out of bounds, her zeal was stirred to bring it ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... unfortunately the case, the question is put less with the genuine desire for knowledge than for the purpose of exhibiting the acumen of the questioner, the form is strongly tinged with the deep orange that indicates conceit. It was at a theosophical meeting that this special shape was encountered, and it accompanied a question which showed considerable thought and penetration. The answer at first given was not thoroughly satisfactory ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... attached me to him doubly; it might be weakness, but it was the antipodes of all that was grovelling and selfish. To these pangs were added the loss of Perdita, lost through my own accursed self-will and conceit. This dear one, my sole relation; whose progress I had marked from tender childhood through the varied path of life, and seen her throughout conspicuous for integrity, devotion, and true affection; for all that constitutes the peculiar graces of the female character, and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... are treated with contempt and derision. Moral philosophy is discarded, and the maxims of ancient wisdom are unworthy of their notice. In this manner, eloquence is dethroned; she is banished from her rightful dominions, and obliged to dwell in the cold regions of antithesis, forced conceit, and pointed sentences. The consequence is, that she, who was once the sovereign mistress of the sciences, and led them as handmaids in her train, is now deprived of her attendants, reduced, impoverished, and, stripped of her usual honours (I might say ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... fresh directions which soon became exhilarating, advances upon which one started with stronger determination and fuller, not lessened, confidence. O heart of Youth! How unfluttered thy beat! How invincible thou art in thine own conceit! What gift of heaven or earth can compare with thy supernal faith! "No matter how small the cage the bird will sing if it ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... that she was going. "I can take her on East in the fall. As soon as she has a little knowledge of the world she'll not expect me to marry her. She can get something to do. I'll help her." And now he felt in conceit with himself again—felt that he was going to be a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... thought she. "He thinks he has learned all there is to learn. It isn't the least use in the world to try to tell him anything. When young folks feel the way he does, it is a waste of time to talk to them. He has got to be shown. There is nothing like experience to take the conceit out of these youngsters." ...
— Old Granny Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... admirable, and excelling the rest, are "Boz's" sketches—actually "living pictures"—of the fashionable footmen at Bath, beside which the strokes in that diverting piece "High Life below Stairs" seem almost flat. The simperings of these gentry, their airs and conceit, we may be sure, obtain now. Once coming out of a Theatre, at some fashionable performance, through a long lane of tall menials, one fussy aristocrat pushed one of them out of his way. The menial contemptuously pushed him back. The other in a rage said, "How dare you? Don't you know, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... came M. de Bartas, known as Adrien among the circle. It was M. de Bartas who boomed out his song in a bass voice, and made prodigious claims to musical knowledge. His self-conceit had taken a stand upon solfeggi; he began by admiring his appearance while he sang, passed thence to talking about music, and finally to talking of nothing else. His musical tastes had become a monomania; he grew animated only on the one ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... ball, she looked very winsome, and smiled up at Dan in shy expectation of a word of approval; but none came. In the early days of their acquaintance he had remarked that she was much more easily depressed than elated about herself, and would be the better of a little more confidence—not to say conceit; but since their marriage he had never given her the slightest sympathy or encouragement to cure her of her diffidence. If anything were amiss in her dress or appearance, he told her of it in the offensive manner of an ill-conditioned under-bred man, generally speaking when they ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the other side, have their private baths for men and women, where they must not come near, nor so much as see one another: and as [6035]Bodine observes lib. 5. de repub. "the Italians could never endure this," or a Spaniard, the very conceit of it would make him mad: and for that cause they lock up their women, and will not suffer them to be near men, so much as in the [6036]church, but with a partition between. He telleth, moreover, how that "when he was ambassador ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... in her tone, in the lift of her eyes, in her cryptic smile. But he smothered such unworthy promptings. It was fresh proof of his own unreasonable conceit. He turned away from his wife in silence, but he was sure that his face ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... books,—that passion being absolutely endless, and inexorable as the grave,—stepped between me and my intentions; until one day, upon arranging my toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery that I had no waistcoat (or vest, as it is now called, through conceit or provincialism), which was not torn or otherwise dilapidated; whereupon, buttoning up my coat to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as possible, I went into the public "hall" (so is called in Oxford the public eating-room) with no misgiving. However, I was detected; for a grave ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... lumberjacks') is distasteful to most people. Plain evaporated milk is the thing to carry—and don't leave it out if you can practicably tote it. The notion that this is a 'baby food' to be scorned by real woodsmen is nothing but a foolish conceit. Few things pay better for their transportation. It will be allowed that Admiral Peary knows something about food values. Here is what he says in The North Pole: 'The essentials, and the only essentials, needed in a serious Arctic sledge journey, no matter what ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... cross the ocean to tell him about God. The skilful fencer who attacks your doubts and drives you from corner to corner of unbelief and leaves you at last in doubt whether you doubt or not, does you a certain service. He gives you exercise, takes the conceit out of you. But the man who lays hold of the real faith that is hidden underneath your doubt,—the silent longing for God and goodness, the secret attraction that draws your heart toward Jesus Christ as the only one who has the words of everlasting life,—the man ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... far possessed with the false conceit of their own righteousness and holiness, and of the horrid wickedness of all others, that they refused obedience to the civil magistrate, and all laws and ordinances of men. Upon pretence that God commanded them to bear no ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... veritable paragon of polish without a single redeeming mannerism, to Morgan he represented one large swagger. There was something in the pose of the eye-glasses and in the clean-shaven upper lip that told of boundless conceit and infinite self-assurance. What right had he, was Morgan's indignant thought—and he made the criticism as of a mere external fact from which he stood aloof—to be so friendly with Margaret? How was it ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... capitalists, and declared that I was theoretically a Socialist. The President grunted, but when I added that he might, so far as I cared, act the Nero and cut off all the financial heads at one blow, he and his countrymen laughed at a conceit which evidently appealed to them. But his Honour relapsed again into a grunt when I inquired what he considered must be the upshot of the agitation. On pressing him, he replied that he was not a prophet. I tried to draw him on the loyalty of the Cape ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... It is plain the writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope in vacuo, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ay, thou may'st jest; my heart is not so light It can digest the least conceit of joy: Entreat him fairly, though I think he loves All places worse that he beholds me in. Wilt ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... however countenanced by high authority—and will obtrude his literary eloquence into our solemn courts of law, he deserves—what does he not deserve?—to be addressed henceforth by a name suggestive at once of ignorance, presumption, and conceit, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... psychical phenomena evinced by the lower animals are not regarded as being either wonderful or extraordinary. Man is a conceited, arrogant individual, and his place in nature has done much toward fostering and enlarging this self-conceit and arrogance. Even in the time of Moses this self-glorification was en evidence. The genesis of the world, as related by this famous historiographer, geographer, naturalist, theologian, and lawgiver, plainly shows ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... simplicity may be improved, but pride and conceit never. Well, I don't discourage you; I think it will please Sir Everard, from what he said when I jested with him about it; only I hope that intolerable papa, with his brogue, and his snuff, and his Latin, and his insufferable ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... muddled and confounded with them, that he scarce ever kept in the right way; though the main maxim of his philosophy was to trust to his senses, and follow his nose. I will not take notice of his doting conceit, that the sun and moon are no bigger than they appear to the eye, a foot or half a yard over; and that the stars are no larger than so many glow-worms. But let us see how he manages his atoms, those almighty tools that do every thing of themselves, ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... tone, which grew in depth and sweetness as she proceeded. Surely, if the author had never had the vanity to deem his brief production possessed of merit, he would have grown into conceit of it had he heard it falling so sweetly from ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... only piece of luck I've had.... By God, Hinde, this serves me right. Eleanor always said I was selfish, and I am. I'm terribly self-satisfied and thick-skinned. I had no qualification for this work ... nothing but my conceit ... and I've been let ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... good doting citizen, who, it is thought, might be of the common-council for his wealth; a fellow sincerely besotted on his own wife, and so wrapt with a conceit of her perfections, that he simply holds himself unworthy of her. And, in that hoodwinked humour, lives more like a suitor than a husband; standing in as true dread of her displeasure, as when he first made love to her. He doth sacrifice twopence in ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... last; "how do you like it? Say, but you are looking fine. You always were a handsome youngster but you're—you're improving, young man. I'm blessed if you don't look like a work of art done in bronze." He laughed with the pleasure of his own conceit and the other ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... perhaps, is so striking as the early development of his peculiar qualities, and the firm unswerving line he struck into from the beginning and continued in to the last. A self-reliance, amounting in weaker and less equally-balanced natures to doggedness and conceit—a clear perception of the circumstances of a case almost resembling intuition—a patriotism verging on the romantic, and a sense of duty never for a moment yielding to the "whips and scorns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... that grand hailing sign had been answered by Fate's decree, he was blind to the pathway leading on. For, in his fond conceit, he only knew ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages." Scarcely was he dead when the first portion of this legacy received some part of its fulfilment in the touching and often quoted words of Ben Jonson:—"My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place or honors; but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and most worthy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... race of ancient time Waxed arrogant in boastful pride; Debauched were they, and borne along On foul corruption's loathsome tide, Till in their stiff-necked self-conceit They e'en the God of ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... mind of God I had to give up my sin. I believe God meets every soul on the spot of self-surrender; and when they are willing to let Him guide and lead. The trouble with many sceptics is their self-conceit. They know more than the Almighty! and they do not come in a teachable spirit. But the moment a man comes in a receptive spirit he is blessed; for "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... her thoroughness take the form of the destruction of Louvain, or of sewing two buttons where only one is needed on the trousers of her soldiers. But I pity her for not finding a larger way to gain her ends in the first place, and for her conceit in thinking that a lot of little thoughts and extra buttons when added together make a great nation. Germany may know exactly how many gold and how many amalgam fillings there are in the teeth of the German army, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... war. It tells the English patriot that the "one jolly Englishman" of the old rhyme is not the easy vanquisher of the "two froggy Frenchmen and one Portugee" which tradition would have him believe. He is thus enabled to steer a middle course between arrant conceit and childish fright. History tells him the actual facts: history is to the patriot what "form" ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... This conceit struck popular fancy as plain argument could not have done, and the Republican party came to be called "Robbie Miller's Hoe "—an imperfect means of reaching a great end, and one that any one might use without ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... XI "To a Master of Arts who said that a Certain Distinguished Painter was Half-educated," was a useful antidote to youthful self-conceit. I had not reached the stage, treated in the chapters on "Women and Marriage," "To a Young Gentleman Who Contemplated Marriage," but I thought the author very wise indeed, and found many other pages which were intensely ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... kindliest of critics, but now and then some popular novelist's conceit will cause him to bristle up ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... he crossed the wide chamber. It was a thing hard to define in words; yet undeniably there was a diffidence and a reluctance manifest in him, as though a sense of guilt wrestled with the man's natural conceit and assurance. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... world knows there is no vertue in charms; but a strong conceit and opinion alone, which forceth a motion of the humours, spirits and blood, which takes away the cause of the malady from the parts affected. The like we may say of the magical effects, superstitious cures, and such as are done by mountebanks and wizards. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Betty," cried Anita, interrupting him. "She can swim better than I can, and I thought I was pretty good." There was no conceit in this remark—it was simply ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... Much of the conceit and ridicule of the character of Mr. Ventilate was apparent, even to my eye, at our first meeting. But he was a person of great practice, and had the reputation of a sound lawyer: which signifies a man who has patience to read reports, and a facility at quoting them. Beside, I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... with the terror of this conceit, everything tended to confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and its discovery in spite of all, made him, as it were, the visible object of the Almighty's wrath. In all the crime and vice and moral ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and conceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing and public speaking, and not only are they going to extol us (to the fattening of our conceit) but they are bound to disclose, even to the unthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which their silence had veiled. Their competition, too, in several kinds of affairs will slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... with by this fond parent, and angrily rebuked by the Doctor for his violence and ferocious intentions, took the matter au grand serieux, with the happy conceit and gravity of youth: said that he himself was very sorry for the affair, that the insult had come upon him without the slightest provocation on his part; that he would permit no man to insult him upon this head without vindicating his own honour, and appealing with great dignity to his uncle, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than halfpence." A review in the last Dublin "Nat. Hist. Review" is the most unfair thing which has appeared,—one mass of misrepresentation. It is evidently by Haughton, the geologist, chemist and mathematician. It shows immeasurable conceit and contempt of all who are not mathematicians. He discusses bees' cells, and puts a series which I have never alluded to, and wholly ignores the intermediate comb of Melipona, which alone led me to my notions. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... "Oh, the conceit of him!" laughed his uncle. "Stick it out, indeed! Why, you don't know what it means, you healthy young rascal. You have the ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... have a rather poetical conceit in accounting for the movements of the celestial bodies. Their theory is that the sun rules the heavens. He is a big chief; the moon is his squaw, and the stars are his children. The sun devours his children whenever he is able to catch them. They are constantly afraid of him as he is passing through ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... it isn't. After all, every girl wants to get married, and without conceit my family, circumstances and, in the privacy of the pages of this journal I may add, my personal appearances, are such as would appeal to most ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... time earlier would have turned his brother's defeat into victory, drew back his thirteen thousand men in good order to guard Hungary. As Napoleon himself had been in a dangerous condition of over-confidence before Aspern, so now his soldiery were clearly in the same plight. Self-conceit had made them unreliable. Bernadotte's corps had displayed something very much like cowardice and mutiny at the last. The army still fought in the main like the perfect machine it was, but the individual men had lost their stern virtue. They believed that victory, plunder, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... you right," growled Hardock. "Take some of the gashly conceit out of you, my lad. Now, then, I'm ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... are affectation and conceit. His verses drip with fine love-honey; but it has been so clarified in meta-physics that much of its flavour and sweetness has escaped. Very often, too, the conceit embodied is preposterously poor. You have as it were a casket of finest gold elaborately ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... line, and her lashes made a thick, softening shadow. She saw they were becoming. She cupped her round chin in her hands and studied herself with a desire to be sure of the truth without prejudice or self conceit. The whole effect of her was glowing, and she felt the glow as others did. She put up a finger to touch the velvet petal texture of her skin, and she saw how prettily pointed and slim her hand was. Yes, ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... respectable girl," said the woman, in a maudlin voice. "What conceit—you have! You might have been so yesterday, but to-day—try it—tell the people that you spent a few hours in the Cannon Queen's house in Belleville and are still a respectable girl. Ha! ha! They will ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal, which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do, so much to himself, if not by himself, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... that city life must differ greatly from that in the country, even more than he had conceded with all his a priori reasonings; and he decided to draw no hasty inferences, but to proceed in the Baconian method by calling at Number Three. He was rather out of conceit with his strategy of thirst, which had so fallen below the actual modes of effecting an entrance, and now resolved to march boldly up with the irresistible engine of straight-forward inquiry,—as straight-forward, at least, as the circumstances would permit. He ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be called popularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felt himself "entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence" that a French school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour in its vigilance against ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... say it as a matter of conceit. I said it as a matter of regret. I have been wildly, madly adored. I am sorry I have. It has been an immense nuisance. I should like to be allowed a little time to ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... now that she had pretended to know a great deal more than she really did. Pretension is very apt to get laughed at. She had always scorned Dotty's self-conceit; but hadn't she shown quite as much herself? Making her auntie suppose she understood cooking, and putting Mrs. Fixfax to all this trouble for nothing? How horrified auntie would be, and the housekeeper too, if they should ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... Mississippi scheme of John Law, which so dazzled and captivated the French people, inspired them with an idea that they could carry on the same game in England. The anticipated failure of his plans did not divert them from their intention. Wise in their own conceit, they imagined they could avoid his faults, carry on their schemes forever, and stretch the cord of credit to its extremest tension without causing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... upright, benevolent tempers have too many opportunities of remarking, with horror, to what desperate lengths this disposition is sometimes carried, and how often the great interests of society are sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, and to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind. Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... he cried in his great voice, "now shall you sing the rest. You have put me out of conceit with my own singing. Why are you not at the feast, where I would be if I were not ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... but wit is in me and I have no small conceit of myself. Having heard many speeches from my father and elder men I am not ill-informed. Now that I have caught you I will administer to you the rebuke you richly deserve. You sprinkle altars from the same lustral-bowl, like relatives, at Olympia, Pylae, Delphi and many other places. Though ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Perhaps he would say, "I am satisfied of the fact from my own disposition." He might as well give a child's reason at once, and say, "CAUSE!" Such persons have seldom heard a lecture, or read a syllable, and yet are always prating with a great show of wisdom, but rather, in fact, of blind conceit. Their silence would be of far more service to the cause of virtue than their opinions. In many cases, it will be found that such persons are not only ignorant, ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... ability to heal mentally. Conceit cannot avert the effects of deceit. Taking advantage of the present ignorance in relation to Christian Science Mind-healing, many are flooding our land with conflicting theories and practice. We should not spread abroad patchwork ideas that in some vital ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... excuse the womenfolk could find to hang upon the peg of jealousy which had been knocked into the wall of feminine conceit and bad intent, by the hammer of Leonie's beauty, and irritating indifference to both men and women, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... be any sin, The parson himself had guilty been, She look'd that day so purely: And did the youth so oft the feat At night, as some did in conceit, It would have spoil'd ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... hope—who are sunk below that state; who have lost their sense of right and wrong; who only care to fulfil the lusts of the flesh in pleasure, ease, and vanity. There are those in whom the voice of conscience is lead for a while, silenced by self-conceit; who say in their prosperity, like the foolish Laodiceans, 'I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing,' and know not that in fact and reality, and in the sight of God, they are 'wretched, and miserable, and ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... towers and chimneys, houses, barracks, and palaces stretched at their feet. A thick, gray, cloud of vapor and smoke hovered over it, and veiled the horizon in dust and fog. "Farewell, Berlin, you city of arrogance and conceit!" cried the duke, joyfully. "I shake your dust from my feet, and strew the sand of your fields over every souvenir of you in memory," and suiting the action to his words, he tossed a handful of it ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... of the earth was represented. In this I did acknowledge Him. But all the glory of the city neither abides nor can make its owner any the happier. It cannot be laid hold upon. It is not solid; it is but in conceit. Oh learn me to be crucified to all this and the like, and make me wise unto salvation! Nov. 9—Dined at Billingsgate; saw the prison of King's Bench at Southwark, and the workers of glass, in all which ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species.' ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... a daughter of the soil. Their servants understand Spanish, and clandestinely watch the conversation and the actions, and become acquainted with all the secrets, of their indiscreet masters, to whom the Filipinos remain an enigma which their conceit ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... I've had.... By God, Hinde, this serves me right. Eleanor always said I was selfish, and I am. I'm terribly self-satisfied and thick-skinned. I had no qualification for this work ... nothing but my conceit ... and I've been ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... after than before that transition. Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind. Hence his impulsive ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... complaisance of others than to retain an unfaltering faith in it for ourselves. The most dogged reformer distrusts himself every little while, and says inwardly, like Luther, "Art thou alone wise?" So he is compelled to exaggerate, in the effort to hold his own. The community is bored by the conceit and egotism of the innovators; so it is by that of poets and artists, orators and statesmen; but if we knew how heavily ballasted all these poor fellows need to be, to keep an even keel amid so many conflicting tempests ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... an amiable conceit of human nature, looking backward, to profess to see what it blindly ignored, looking forward; and go to any penitentiary in America, ask the convicts, and you will find that, according to the stories, there are no guilty men behind the bars; ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... And so—if you laugh, you kill me, Raphael—and so Miriam, the daughter of Jonathan—Miriam, of the house of David—Miriam, the descendant of Ruth and Rachab, of Rachel and Sara, became a Christian nun, and shut herself up to see visions, and dream dreams, and fattened her own mad self-conceit upon the impious fancy that she was the spouse of the Nazarene, Joshua Bar-Joseph, whom she called Jehovah Ishi—Silence! If you stop me a moment, it may be too late. I hear them calling me already; and I made them promise not to take me before I had ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of man, perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense self-conceit at the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... unusually great means—their very wealth forbids faithful friendships. For not only is Fortune blind herself; but she generally makes those blind also who enjoy her favours. They are carried, so to speak, beyond themselves with self-conceit and self-will; nor can anything be more perfectly intolerable than a successful fool. You may often see it. Men who before had pleasant manners enough undergo a complete change on attaining power of office. They despise their old friends: devote ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a MOST curious animal—a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven years, to a Cashier's position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay among the factories of the North. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of flesh the pains of constitutional disease, and triumphing over physical confinement and affliction. His carriage was erect—there was a soldierly affectation, of which, indeed, the hero of Buena Vista gave evidence through his life, having the singular conceit that his genius was military and fitter for arms than for the council. He had a precise manner, and an austerity that was at first forbidding; but his voice was always clear and firm. Although not a scholar in the pedantic sense of the term, and making no pretensions ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... that I must be possessed by the very evils I hated, and that was the reason I was so violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated other people's cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... visitor—the enamoured goddess—is, of all female figures which I have ever seen upon canvass, one of the most affected, meagre, and uninteresting. Diana has been exchanged for an opera dancer. The waist is pinched in, the attitude is full of conceit, and there is a dark shadow about the neck, as if she had been trying some previous experiment with a rope! Endymion could never open his eyes to gaze upon a figure so utterly unworthy of the representation of an enamoured deity.[190] The ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... wealth of his family had, at an early age, inspired him with courage and self-conceit, so that in his blind, frivolous presumption, the only person, as he thought, who exceeded his own fascination was possibly the King, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... The Nazarene, or Christianity, Judaic, Pagan, and Mahometan (1718); and Pantheisticon (1720). The outcry raised by the orthodox party against the "poor gentleman" who had "to beg for half- crowns," and "ran into debt for his wigs, clothes, and lodging," together with his own vanity and conceit, changed him from being a somewhat free- thinking Christian into an infidel and atheist or Pantheist. He died in extreme poverty at ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... was going to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections. He was altogether too good-looking, and, what is more, he had none of that consciousness and conceit about him which usually afflicts handsome men, and makes them deservedly ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... brand Till it is burnt out; Fire is kindled from fire; A man gets knowledge By talk with a man, But becomes wilful by self-conceit. Ha'vama'l. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all time the sovereign purifier to ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... ten years. The volumes remained in my possession unregarded—never looked at—till 1870, when I examined them, and, with many blushes, destroyed them. They convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, extravagance, and conceit. But they had habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... extinction in any case. If a man, thinking that his family is "tainted," displays so much foresighted patriotism, humility, and lifelong self-denial as to have no children, the presumption is that the loss to humanity by the discontinuance of such a type is greater than the gain. "Conceit in smallest bodies strongest works," and it does not follow that a sense of one's own excellence justifies one's utmost fecundity or the reverse. Mr. Vrooman, who, with Mrs. Vrooman, founded Ruskin Hall at Oxford, writes to much the same effect. He argues that people intelligent ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... if I were you I would put the matter shortly and simply, for it is the business of one describing a pilgrimage or any other matter not to puff himself up with vain conceit, nor to be always picking about for picturesque situations, but to set down plainly and shortly what he has seen and heard, describing the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the late Braham—these were the songs in which the roaring concertina and strident tenor of Gustus Junior exulted together. "Tell me when you're tired, ladies and gentlemen," said the minstrel solicitor. "There's no conceit about me. Will you have a little sentiment by way of variety? Shall I wind up with 'The Mistletoe Bough' and ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... by this post, the Title (with some remarks on a separate page), and the first three chapters. If you have patience to read all Chapter I., I honestly think you will have a fair notion of the interest of the whole book. It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original. If you think otherwise, I must repeat my request that you will freely reject my work; and though I shall be a little disappointed, I shall be in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... with far-sighted wisdom. Taine, the prophet, has more than ever something to tell us. He warned his countrymen against themselves, their humanity, and hence against their fears, anxieties, greed, ambitions, conceit and excessive imagination. His remarks and judgments exhort us to be responsible, modest and kind and to select wise and modest leaders. He warns us against young hungry men's natural desire to mass ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... argument is, that learning is apt to lead to conceit and pride, or to a presumed superiority of intellect, in consequence of which men raise themselves in their own estimation, and look down upon others as creatures of an inferior order of race. To this I may answer, that as prodigies are ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... he one fair morning, and all day His heart beat awfully against his side; And to his heart he inwardly did pray For power to speak; but still the ruddy tide Stifled his voice, and puls'd resolve away— Fever'd his high conceit of such a bride, Yet brought him to the meekness of a child: Alas! when passion is both ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... thy weak brain. But an hour agone enfranchised from Grub Street, thou must sing 'I'd be a butterfly.' Thou art vanity absolute, conceit beyond measure, and presumption out of all whooping. Yea, and but as a fool Pygmalion, not content with loving thine own handiwork, thou must needs fall in love with the goddess that breathed life into its stiff limbs; must yearn, not for Galatea, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... my uncle was a bachelor, he did not choose to dine at a 'traiteur' (the name 'restaurateur' was not then introduced). He told my mother that Napoleon was very morose. 'I fear,' added he, 'that that young man has more self-conceit than is suitable to his condition. When he dined with me he began to declaim violently against the luxury of the young men of the military school. After a little he turned the conversation on Mania, and the present education of the young Maniotes, drawing a comparison between it and the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... they made the place blossom again; they conquered other tribes, and Manitou declared them his chosen ones, from whom alone he would accept sacrifice. But their chief became so ambitious that he wanted to supplant the Manitou in the worship of the people, and finally, in a lunacy of self-conceit, he challenged the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... "For fiddlesticks! For conceit and vanity and vainglory. Go away! My head is fit to split. Natalina, why haven't you given me my smelling salts? And why ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... should be their publisher, I should have to shut up shop; I should pass my time very agreeably no doubt, but the conversations would cost too much. I am not rich enough yet to listen to all the monologues of self-conceit. Nobody does, except in classical tragedies ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of the road being flashed abroad as it fell. Then the two locomotives, one from the west and the other from the east, drew up to each other on the single line, coming into gentle collision, that they in their way, in the pleasing conceit of their drivers, might symbolise the fraternisation that went on. It does not spoil the story of the ceremony to state that the laurel tie, with its inscriptions and its magnificent mountings, was only formally ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... cake of delicious-looking soap on its sliding rack across the bath. He looked as a man in a fairy-story might look. It was as if an enchanted palace, with the princess just round the corner, had been offered him. Smiling at the conceit, he turned to the man. "I didn't notice the telephone," he said; "I suppose ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... to the sound of the big gun, and by Baden-Powell's refusal to take a serious view of the situation in the frequent communications that passed between them. It may be said that Cronje was "chaffed" away from Mafeking; the gibes put him out of conceit with himself, and instead of stimulating him into activity only made him more dull-spirited than he was by nature. He had none of the instinctive military genius which showed itself so notably in most of his colleagues, who, having turned their ploughshares into swords at a moment's ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... despair of soon putting him and la Peyrade at loggerheads. In the management of a newspaper there are lots of inevitable disagreements, and by always taking the side of the fool against the clever man, I can increase the conceit of one and wound the conceit of the other until life together becomes impossible. Besides, you spoke just now of political danger; now the manager of a newspaper, as you ought to know, when he has the intellect to be something ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of his fresh round face, in his soft brown eyes, lovely pouting lips, and little white hands. Everything about him was suggestive of the happy light-heartedness of perfect health and youth—the carelessness, conceit, self-indulgence, and charm of youth. He used his eyes, and smiled and leaned his head as boys do who know that people look at them admiringly. He wore a loose white coat, made like a blouse, a blue kerchief wrapped his slender throat, and a battered ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... masterpieces of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous vigor, it belongs to the spring-time of literature. It has entered into the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a social realm which, with all its whimsical conceit, has almost historical solidity. The Knickerbocker pantheon is almost as real as that of Olympus. The introductory chapters are of that elephantine facetiousness which pleased our great-grandfathers, but which is exceedingly tedious to modern taste; and the humor of the book occasionally has ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... to do—buckle down to study next fall. And if I show any conceit in the future, well, I want you and Ben Basswood, and Roger and Phil, and all the others, to knock it right out of me," went on the money-lender's son, earnestly. "My eyes are open and I'm going ahead, and I ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... Mr. Hartrick, "I don't at all like to call you over the coals; but I think it is a pity to speak against Molly so much as you do in her sister's presence. Linda is getting eaten up with conceit; she will be an intolerable woman by and by, so self-opinionated, and so pleased with herself. After all, poor Molly may have the best of it in the future; she is a fine ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... taken completely off his guard by her apparent acquiescence, and touched by her desire to accompany him, which he attributed, with the conceit of his kind, to ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... Say, but you are looking fine. You always were a handsome youngster but you're—you're improving, young man. I'm blessed if you don't look like a work of art done in bronze." He laughed with the pleasure of his own conceit and the other ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... do not find that a base liberalism believed in liberty. Neither did it believe in freedom of thought. It is the blossom of egotism; it has nothing to which it bows; it beholds no majesty to which it can look up. It is sublime self-conceit, and it has no hesitancy in telling the whole human race that at its grandest moments it has been wrong. This egotism dared to become active in Rome, and it asked the Christians, in the person of the Emperor, to worship him, and to strew incense about him. "I will ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... which Spout, the eloquent, dissected the philosophy of mirth in the same style and with the same effect that the boy in the story dissected his grandmamma's bellows to see how the wind was raised. I agree with Spout that wit and humor are glorious; that satire, pricking the balloons of conceit, vain glory, and hypocrisy, is invaluable; that a good laugh can come only from a warm heart; that the man in motley is often wiser than the judge in ermine or the priest in lawn. These qualities are goodly in literature. We all love the kindly humorist from ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... is right, Pothinus: you will come to the shore with much conceit washed out of you. (The ladies laugh. Cleopatra rises impatiently.) Begone, all of you. I will speak with Pothinus alone. Drive them out, Ftatateeta. (They run out laughing. Ftatateeta shuts the door on them.) What are YOU ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... received by an old servant, Narkiz Semyonov, who had had notice of my coming. This old servant was not in the least like 'Savelitch' or 'Caleb'; my friend used to call him in joke 'Marquis.' There was something of conceit, even of affectation, about him; he looked down on us young men with a certain dignity, but cherished no particularly respectful sentiments for other landowners either; of his old master he spoke slightingly, while his own class he ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put out of conceit with yourself,—it may do you good; but I wouldn't go to 'the governor' with my verses, if I were you. For either he will think what you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as he could have written himself,—in fact, he always did believe in hereditary genius,—or he will pooh-pooh ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... disposal, and fix the morality of society. Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having opinions, just ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... was pleased" not only with the stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous descant" alone interrupts it. Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet. So difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between an intellectual extravagance and a ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... are disgusted by the assertion that Kings, Princes, Lords, are Snobs, to say 'You are confessedly a Snob yourself. In professing to depict Snobs, it is only your own ugly mug which you are copying with a Narcissus-like conceit and fatuity.' But I shall pardon this explosion of ill-temper on the part of my constant reader, reflecting upon the misfortune of his birth and country. It is impossible for ANY Briton, perhaps, not to ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gin much fo'h yer old pack a' bones if mas'r what gwine to buy ye know'd ye like I. Ye' h'ant da property what bring long price wid Buckra," replies Dandy, who views Aunt Rachel rather suspiciously, seems inclined to relieve her conceit, and has taken very good care that his own dimensions are trimmed up to the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... to restore Felix's opinion of it, and an idea occurring to Philip, he said a capital plan would be to add an outrigger, and so balance it perfectly. But though usually quick to adopt ideas when they were good, in this case Felix was too much out of conceit with himself. He would listen to nothing. Still, he could not banish it from his mind, though now ashamed to return to it after so obstinately refusing all suggestions. He wandered aimlessly about in the woods, till one day he found ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... of the celestial bodies. The passage in the thirteenth essay is the more notable in itself, being likewise a protest against human self-sufficiency, though the bearing of the illustration is directly reversed. Here he derides man's conceit: "We entertain and carry all with us: whence it followeth that we deem our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemn consultation of the stars." Then follow references to Caesar's ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... spear, had been known to their ancestors; and that they, in their superstitious fancies, had imagined that by wearing his totem, it would save them from being wounded with the same kind of weapon used in killing him. Let us not laugh at such a singular conceit among uncivilized tribes, for it still prevails in Europe. On many of the French and German soldiers, killed during the last German war, were found talismans composed of strips of paper, parchment or cloth, on which were written ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... the tears that people shed for themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits they can upon ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... those?" he inquired, handing the glasses, and blandly ignoring Miss Deane's petulance. Her brain was busy with other things while she twisted the binoculars to suit her vision. Rainbow Island—Iris—it was a nice conceit. But "menial" struck a discordant note. This man was no menial in appearance or speech. Why was ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... only, with ginger and Guinea pepper. I was likewise informed, that of Tolu lozenges, peppermint lozenges and ginger pearls, and several other sorts of lozenges, two kinds were kept; that the reduced articles, as they were called, were manufactured for those very clever persons in their own conceit, who are fond of haggling, and insist on buying better bargains than other people, shutting their eyes to the defects of an article, so that they can enjoy the delight of getting it cheap; and, secondly for those persons, ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... Captain Kirby is certainly unanimous. The shooting, with its necessary disorder, has got us out of our habits of snap, and today we have been put through a course of sprouts that has taken away any conceit that we might have had. This morning he gave us ten rounds of blank cartridges and took us out into our usual ground, the Peru road and the fields adjoining. First, in anticipation of tomorrow, by platoons we were given rapid-fire practice, sitting and firing ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... and this is an added reason why they hesitate to take chances. These propositions being true, they establish another one, viz: that most of the attempted frauds at the present time in this connection, are by the ignorant and those whose conceit does not permit them to believe that any one knows ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... will say: "At any rate, we might moderate somewhat the splendour of our ideal and the audacity of our self-conceit, so that there should be a less grotesque disparity between the aim and the achievement. Surely such moderation would be more in accord with common sense! Surely it would lessen the spiritual fatigue and ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... hour. Offers of pipes, clasp-knives, tobacco, etc., rained upon him from the very men who had cuffed and kicked him like a dog but a few days before; and even his refusal of these gifts, which would formerly have been set down to conceit and "uppishness," was now taken in perfectly good part. In fact, that one deed of promptitude and courage had raised him from the last to one of the first among the whole crew. So true is it that ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by directing his aspirations ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... prefer that Robert's mission should fail through a delivery of his letters to the wrong man? Bigot certainly was not one with whom the English could deal easily, since so far as Robert could learn he was wrapped in the folds of a huge conceit. ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Conceit and Affectation on one hand, and Peevishness and Perverseness of Temper on the other, will lay the best Genius under great Disadvantages, and raise such Dislike and Opposition, as will bear it down in ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... beyond your powers (I the same) as in the case of the boat. I think you over estimate yourself, which I never did. You thought you ought to have had an "A" in English, and were not prepared for your low mark in French and German. Do a little self-examination and nip the bud of conceit; get a fair estimate and make it too low rather than too high. I am sure I know my own weak points, see if you can't find yours. That saying of the ancients, "know thyself," is to be pondered daily. I always keep my expectations down, so that I am not disappointed ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... twofold worse the children of hell than they were before, and than their teachers were, Matth. xxiii. 15; that is, their doctrine begat such blindness, such vain confidence, and groundless boldness in their disciples, as to involve them in that conceit of conversion that was false, and ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... intended to reprove a vain, fantastical, conceited and preposterous Humour, which about that time prevailed very much in France. It had the desir'd good Effect, and conduced a great deal towards rooting out a Taste so unreasonable and ridiculous.—-As Pride, Conceit, Vanity, and Affectation, are Foibles so often found amongst the Fair Sex at present, I have attempted this Translation, in hopes of doing service to my pretty Country-Women.—And, certainly, it must have a double efficacy, under the Patronage of one ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... any more than it deceives us. His vanity is more deplorable; and the only palliation it admits is the fact that it is a defect which rarely goes with a bad heart. Had Cicero been less vain, he might have been more ambitious; as it was, his ridiculous self-conceit injured no one but himself. His wordiness is of all his faults the most seductive and the most conspicuous, and procured for him even in his lifetime the epithet of Asiatic. He himself was sensible that his periods were overloaded. As has been well said, he leaves nothing to the imagination. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... highest learning in full harmony with the noblest soul, grand by every charm of culture, useful and beautiful because useful; feminine purity and delicacy and refinement giving their luster and their power to the most absolute science—woman learned without infidelity and wise without conceit, the crowned queen of the world by right of that Knowledge which is Power and that Beauty which ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... understanding, be taken as the whole of the world-pervading Anglo-Saxon family. The Negroes of the West Indies number a good deal more than two million souls. Does this suggester of extravagances mean that the prejudices and vain conceit of the few dozens whom he champions should be made to override and overbear, in political arrangements, the serious and solid interests of so many [187] hundreds of thousands? That "the two races are not equal" is a statement which no sane ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... her bantlings. She is but a frosty parent if at bottom kindly, and, when she has a shadow of justification, proud. In the present instance she stands excused by the sore shock caused her conservatism by the conceit of a building of glass and iron four times as long as St. Paul's, high enough to accommodate comfortably one of her ancestral elms, and capacious enough to sustain a general invitation to all mankind ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... proud in his own conceit, and, mimicking one greater than he, flew down forthright and lighted on the back of a fat ram with a thick fleece, that was matted by his lying till it was like woolen felt. As soon as the Sparrow pounced upon the sheep's back he flopped his wings to fly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and absurdity. I will not defend this blasphemous speech; but often, as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a perspective. This trifling alteration, not to mention the prodigious saving it would be in the tear and wear of the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the canvas. Copyists are kept busy, repeating the composition for eager purchasers, and it has made its way all over the world. The circle of graceful angels who, with the boy St. John, join the mother in adoring the Christ-child, is one of the chief attractions of the picture. It is a pretty conceit that one of these angels showers ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... hopelessly low, dull, and disreputable. You could not say what, but there was a taint about the house and its entourages. Who was the Begum, with her money, and without her h's, and where did she come from? What an extraordinary little piece of conceit the daughter was, with her Gallicised graces and daring affectations, not fit for well-bred English girls to associate with! What strange people were those they assembled round about them! Sir Francis Clavering was a gambler, living notoriously in the society of blacklegs and profligates. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... form of an intimate conversation, this time between a Brahman, Uddalaka Aruni, and his son Svetaketu who is twenty-four years of age and having just finished his studentship is very well satisfied with himself. His father remarks on his conceit and says "Have you ever asked your teachers for that instruction by which the unheard becomes heard, the unperceived perceived and the unknown known?" Svetaketu enquires what this instruction is and his father replies, "As by one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, and the change[187] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... but a pleasure deferred, then, Mr. Croyden," said Miss Erskine, impenetrable in her self conceit. "The next morning will do, quite as well—I shall come at ten o'clock—What a lovely evening this is, Mrs. Carrington!" preparing to patronize ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... was quick, too, to see that that particular lump of potters' clay which was Herman Klein was ready for the wheel. Even while he was cursing the girl his cunning mind was already plotting, revenge for the Spencers, self-aggrandizement among his fellows for himself. His inordinate conceit, wounded by Anna's defection, found comfort in the early prospect of putting over a big thing. He carried the coal in, to find Herman gloomily clearing his untidy table. For a moment they worked in silence, Rudolph at the stove, Herman ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is a woman," cried Antony as he went out, "I swear by the soul of my father that she shall be handed over to you, my valiant young man, and we'll see if your courage comes up to your conceit." ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... sentiment, of original fancy, or even of successful imitation. In prose, the least offensive of the Byzantine writers are absolved from censure by their naked and unpresuming simplicity: but the orators, most eloquent [112] in their own conceit, are the farthest removed from the models whom they affect to emulate. In every page our taste and reason are wounded by the choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... "Gail Hamilton," a cousin of Mrs. Blaine, resided with them and added greatly to the charm of the establishment. The world in general as well as his eulogists have done full justice to Mr. Blaine's amazing tact and charm of manner; but I may be pardoned the conceit if I offer my own tribute by referring to a graceful remark he made the first time I had the pleasure of meeting him. I heard someone say: "Here comes Mr. Blaine," and as I turned and he was formally presented to me I saw before me a distinguished looking middle-aged man of commanding presence, ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... repeated, at every pause, "You are a dupe; but I like you the better for it. And," added he, "you don't—blind buzzard! as your want of conceit makes you, for which I like you the better, too—you don't see the reason why he banished you from Castle Hermitage—you don't see that he is jealous of your rivalling that ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... then!" he cried exultingly. "Isn't it strange how the love of being right remains with us, when we think we have safely combated every other self-conceit. Well, Mr. Hatteras, I am very pleased to have made your acquaintance. Somehow I think we are destined to meet again—where I cannot say. At any rate, let us hope that that meeting will be as pleasant and ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... should carry weight, and that he should fight at a sad disadvantage. And the greater missionary tells us that he knew why that weight was appointed him to carry; and that he felt he needed it all to save him from a strong tendency to undue self-conceit. No one knows, now, what the burden was which he bore; but it was heavy and painful; it was "a thorn in the flesh." Three times he earnestly asked that it might be taken away; but the answer he got implied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... managed it as cruelly as you could, and I have made you respect my sex, haven't I? (Arranging gloves and fan.) I only pray that she'll know you some day as I know you now. I wouldn't be you then, for I think even your conceit will be hurt. I hope she'll pay you back the humiliation you've brought on me. I hope—No. I don't! I can't give you up! I must have something to look forward to or I shall go crazy. When it's all over, come back to me, come back to me, and you'll ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Cavendish Dusautoy had entirely surpassed him both in self-assertion and in the grounds for it. His incipient dandyisms faded into insignificance beside the splendours of the heir of thousands; and he, who among all his faults had never numbered conceit or forwardness, had little chance beside such an implicit believer in ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hatreds and attachments; a modern simpleton who swallowed whole one of the old systems of philosophy, and took the indigestion it occasioned for the signs of a divine afflux or the voice of an inward monitor, might see his interest in a form of self-conceit which he called self-rewarding virtue; fanatics who believed in the coming Scourge and Renovation might see their own interest in a future palm-branch and white robe: but no man of clear intellect allowed his ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the silent operations that take place in other men's minds, but in my own, even under the greatest misfortunes a droll conceit will more rally my crushed spirits than all the moral ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... classification easy and definite, which was enshrined in the Aristotelian tradition, and protected by its supposed necessity for orthodox dogma, was suddenly swept away for ever out of the biological world. The difference between man and the lower animals, which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with certainty be placed either within or without the human family. The sun and the planets had already been shown by Laplace to be very probably derived ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other was an even more striking effigy of General O'Neil, of the Armies of the Irish Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed in a bold conceit of his presence there as conqueror of Canada in the year 1875. Mr. Arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions upon the sublimity of nature, and he could not conceive, without disadvantage to them, how Miss Ellison and the colonel should accept them so cheerfully as part of the pleasure ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... village, and was as good as she was pretty. To say the truth, the time had been when Bessy had not felt unkindly towards the yellow-haired lad; but his conduct had long put a gulf between them, which only the conceit of a scamp would have attempted to pass. However, he flattered himself that he "knew what the lasses meant when they said no;" and on the strength of this knowledge he presumed far enough to elicit a rebuff so ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... then, if they don't knock the life they will knock the conceit and the superfluous flesh out of ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himself sweetly commended as "voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit." In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and the trochaic movement of the short lines meet the contrary movement of the rest, with an exquisite effect of flux and reflux. The "dancers" whose time they sang must have danced (with Perdita) like "a ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... despotically. Many difficulties were those. And if one would consider that others, who must be considered of equal or greater spirit, had abandoned them as unconquerable, he would understand their human prudence, or temerity, or their great conceit. But the robust vicar-provincial stumbled in nothing, his wonderful zeal facilitating everything. For that administration and conquest, he appointed Fray Miguel de Santa Maria the adelantado, giving him as associates father Fray Pedro de San Josef, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... dust-white road as the sunset shadows grew long. He knew the exact spot—the last bit of woodland—from where Martin, across level-lying fields, could obtain his first glimpse of the old farmhouse and porch. His moving-picture conceit next placed M'ri, dressed in white, with touches of blue, on the west porch. He had decided that in the Long Ago Days she had been wont to wear blue, which he imagined to be the Judge's favorite color. Then he caused the unimpressionable Judge to tie his horse to the hitching post ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... is Rothey, for though he comes from the land of Ham, he don't eat pork. But it pleases the sarcumsised Jew, and the unsarcumsised tag-rag and bobtail that are to be admitted, and who verily do believe (for their bump of conceit is largely developed) that they can improve the Colleges by ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... as these I mean to do When Peace once more resumes her sway; To walk barefooted through the dew And while the sunlit hours away, If haply I may find some gay Conceit to light a sombre mind, As gracious as a Summer day, As wayward as ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... shrewdness, a certain instinct, as to both men and affairs, which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons. But, like most accomplishments, these also brought their own conceit with them. Lord Grosville having, in his own opinion, done extremely well without much book education himself, had but little ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... personal fervour. He cared little for the manner of saying a thing, so long as the heart spoke out frankly and freely; he strove to discern the energy of the soul in all men; he could forgive everything except meanness, cowardice, egotism and conceit; there was no fault of a generous and impulsive nature ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... courted by the solitary invalid, or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly about in the hotel parlours, looking on and not knowing how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit of themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one may notice in certain families. The very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another; they equipped their house for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... China, India and Persia, seem made to take the conceit from upstart nations like those of Europe and our own toddling America. Directly we scratch the surface and look for the beginning of applied arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest civilisation. It would seem that in a study of fabrics which are made ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... talk to you though you will not understand! Once upon a time the world was ruled by men who were ruled by omens. Man was then not so wise in his own conceit. His own soul was nearer the soul of things. He was not a mere gob of bumptiousness covered with the shell of cocksureness. He was willing to be informed. He sought the omens of true nature—he allowed Fate ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... having met him once in society, that he was the concentration of conceit in appearance and manner. But since then they seem ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... wheeles, and rowling deuises, and vpholding supporters, so great large and innumerable a sort of stones should be brought thither, and of what matter theyr cement that ioyned and held them together, was made the heygth of the Obelisk and statelinesse of the Pyramides, exceeding the imagined conceit of Dimocrates proposed to Alexander the great, about a worke to be performed vpon the hill Athos. For the strangenes of the Egiptian building might giue place to this. The famous laborinths were far inferior, Lemnos is not to be rehearsed the Theaters of old time were in comparison ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... a proper reverence for your age and our common blood, I do not value your favour at a boddle's purchase. I was brought up to have a good conceit of myself; and if you were all the uncle, and all the family, I had in the world ten times over, I wouldn't buy your liking at ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... awake,—yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed right, he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger word, he sprang, his known resources: he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting- leopards, after the affrighted game. How they could retain such ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... goods. Political excitement. Resentment in the Plague Refuge Camp; how it was overcome. The agency of the Church. An improved type of Hindu schoolboy; how they dress; their manners; their interest in religion. Moral teaching in schools. Conceit of ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... may as well show a smile to the world as a worried look, or a mean look, or one of the countless casts of countenance that are moulded by conceit and vanity. A smile is frequently misconstrued by the simple-hearted into the outward sign of inward kindness. Many think that it conciliates children and little dogs. But that which the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... speaking, he laughed heartily, excited more perhaps by the delight of having got his friend safe at his side, under circumstances so trying, than by any conceit that happened to cross his fancy, and exhibiting this outbreaking of feeling in a manner that was a little remarkable, since his merriment was not accompanied by any noise. Although Chingachgook both understood and spoke English, he was unwilling ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... point where by making a slight detour among some pines he could cross farther down, a striking but wholly incongruous figure emerged from the trees. With shining top hat, fur-lined coat, gauntlets and cane, M. Lalonde, the Montreal detective, came forward with his professional conceit no whit impaired by juxtaposition with these glacial and solitary surroundings. He handed his card to the priest and bowed to ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... opinion, That a philosopher may be rich if he will. Thus your Lordship seeth how I comfort myself; to the increase whereof I would fain please myself to believe that to be true which my Lord Treasurer writeth; which is, that it is more than a philosopher morally can disgest. But without any such high conceit, I esteem it like the pulling out of an aching tooth, which, I remember, when I was a child, and had little philosophy, I was glad of when it was done. For your Lordship, I do think myself more beholding to you than to any man. And ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... only too gentle, and too soon ended. As for robbery, if I have robbed him of a little self-conceit, I will answer to God for that when my hour shall come! How is it your affair to drag that whimpering fool through Asia at your tail—you a German ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... as we rode back to his home," the young man wrote. "We knew the die had been cast. We had seen it fall carelessly out of the hand of Ignorance, obeying intellects swelled with hereditary passion and conceit. I now had something to say ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... a shadow of conceit. "They believe in me because they know that for their sakes I suffered a kind of martyrdom, going, as I did, amongst your people to serve in the lowest state, and all to help free ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... polemic stress upon the doctrine of future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be. In short, with all sorts of cavilers, it was best, both for them and everybody, that whoever had the true light should stick behind the secure ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... because I think that the French are right to fight on rather than submit to the dismemberment of their country; and because I prefer a Republic to a Monarchy where a King reigns by right divine. But when I read the bombastic articles in the newspapers—when I see the insane conceit and the utter ignorance of those with whom I am thrown—when I find them really believing that they are heroes because they are going, they say, to win battles, it is difficult to entertain any great sympathy for them. How utterly must poor old Badinguet, before whom they ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... spurs; I was commended by great men for my valour; I thought myself the goodliest man of war in all broad England. Then, first, I fell out of my favour with the great; and now I have been well thrashed, and clean lost my soldiers. There was a downfall for conceit! But, dear, I care not—dear, if ye still love me and will wed, I would have my knighthood done away, and mind it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal, which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do, so much to himself, if not by himself, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... ability of body, and was wont to call him his Gray-Steill. [12] Archibald, being banished into England, could not well comport with the humor of that nation, which he thought to be too proud, and that they had too high a conceit of themselves, joined with a contempt and despising of all others. Wherefore, being wearied of that life, and remembering the King's favor of old towards him, he determined to try the King's mercifulness and clemency. So he comes into ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... reflections of Hubert Marien. He had seen enough in his relations with women to have no doubt about Jacqueline's feelings, of which indeed he had watched the rise and progress from the time she had first begun to conceive a passion for him, with a mixture of amusement and conceit. The most cautious of men are not insensible to flattery, whatever form it may take. To be fallen in love with by a child was no doubt absurd—a thing to be laughed at—but Jacqueline seemed no longer a child, since for him she had uncovered ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... with the conceit of a vulgar and inflated man, who not only fancies himself in possession of a power that others dread, but who was so far blinded to his own qualities as to think his opinion of importance to those whom he felt, in the minutest fibre of his envious and malignant ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of these invasions, which might deserve our notice, were it not justly to be suspected as the fanciful conceit of a recent sophist. We are told, that in the sack of Athens the Goths had collected all the libraries, and were on the point of setting fire to this funeral pile of Grecian learning, had not one of their chiefs, of more refined policy than his brethren, dissuaded them from the design; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... us, however, could not prevent an element of pity from tincturing our amusement. If his self-conceit was comical, by reason of its candour, it was surely pitiable, because of the poor, dwarfed starveling of a soul that it revealed. Here was a man, with life in his veins, and round about him the whole mystery and richness ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... teeth of my father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,' from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from that, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I should have stuck here—if it had been possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, pour deux sous, whether it were possible. If I had waited I ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... which both the Daciers resented any thing that was said against the ancient writers was carried to the extreme, and had, at times, something ludicrous in it. But Madame Dacier's enthusiasm was real, and unaccompanied by pedantry or conceit. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... but it was evident that, while Kalliope disowned conceit of station for herself, she could not always cross her mother's wishes. It was further elicited that if Lady Flight had taken up the matter there would have been no difficulty. Half a year ago the Flights had seemed to the young ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... consider. For me, would it not be the better part to show her that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be my first consideration? Certainly there is nothing in a man I despise more than conceit in affairs of this sort. When I hear one of my sex boasting of his 'conquests,' I turn from him in disgust. 'Conquest' implies effort; and to lay one's self out for victories over the other sex always reminds me of pigeon-shooting. On the other hand, we must make ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... characteristics of an immigrant, who has abandoned family traditions and is proudly confident that his bequest to posterity is to outshine what he has inherited. Charles was not exactly a stupid man, but he certainly was dazzled by his early surroundings into an overestimate of himself, into a conceit that was a tremendous stumbling-block in his path. He had not the kind of intelligence that would have enabled him to take at their worth the rhetorical phrases of adulation heaped upon him on festal occasions. Yet this same conceit, this very self-confidence, gave ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... references close the history. In A Woman is a Weathercock, III, iii, printed in 1612, but written earlier, one of the actors exclaims of an insufferable pun: "O Newington Conceit!" The fact that this sneer is the only reference to the Newington Playhouse found in contemporary literature is a commentary on the low esteem in which the building was held by the Elizabethans, and its relative unimportance for the history of ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... by this not to become wise in his own conceit. Pride in unsound theories is worse than ignorance. Humility becomes a Mason. Take some quiet, sober moment of life, and add together the two ideas of Pride and Man; behold him, creature of a span, stalking through infinite ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... day, the scales of self-conceit seemed to have gone. She had her childhood's heart again. Her bitter remorse, her afterthoughts of perplexity had been lulled in the long calm of the respite, and when roused again, even by this sudden sorrow, she woke to her ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... petting in England—let them be told (perhaps it may be said plainest by their best friends) that there are just as many proud exclusives among them as in any other stratum of society, and that they have at least a full share too of conceit, foppery, and affectation. ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... for that big bully, Banbury, is to be my opponent, and I'd do anything to take the conceit out of him and his crowd. Ritchie timed me, and said I had discounted the best record ever made by an ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... mutter something, but paid no heed, knowing that it was something about being careful with the gun, for I was not without my share of conceit and belief in my capacity of taking care of a gun. For my father had rather encouraged me to practise with his fowling-piece, as also with one of the heavy fire-locks we ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... attorney," said the admiral, as he put the letter in his pocket, "and almost enough to put one in conceit of lawyers." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... treated with contempt and derision. Moral philosophy is discarded, and the maxims of ancient wisdom are unworthy of their notice. In this manner, eloquence is dethroned; she is banished from her rightful dominions, and obliged to dwell in the cold regions of antithesis, forced conceit, and pointed sentences. The consequence is, that she, who was once the sovereign mistress of the sciences, and led them as handmaids in her train, is now deprived of her attendants, reduced, impoverished, and, stripped of her usual ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... fear, or affectation; and strove to forget the author's person, while his works fell under their consideration. They have treated simple dulness as the object of mirth or compassion, according to the nature of its appearance. Petulance and self-conceit they have corrected with more severe strictures; and though they have given no quarter to insolence, scurrility and sedition, they will venture to affirm, that no production of merit has been defrauded of its due share of applause. On the contrary, they have cherished with commendation, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... And after all, these worthy people do not suffer so greatly. If I did not take their money some other impostor would. Their huge conceit of intelligence would breed perhaps some viler swindle than my facetious rappings. That's the line our doubting bishops take, and why shouldn't I? For example, these people might give it to Public Charities, minister to the fattened secretary, the prodigal ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... nearly a year since I was at Tabatinga; I go to find my monuments in ruin! And if it is not objectionable to you, Mr. Garral, I would render myself again worthy of the reputation which I have acquired in these parts, the question of reis, and not that of conceit, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... the conceit of youth," said Dorothy, smiling. "Captain Kempt, U.S.N., retired. His youngest daughter is just two ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... to live very long to do that. I have often thought, though, that if, when we looked into the mirror, we could see our natures as well as our reflected features, our conceit would ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... going West to reduce the aboriginal population; I hope we shall have no trouble with the red men. When we get among the people who have always lived there, such a title will make us ridiculous, for it smacks of conceit; ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... noticed that the Countess had a small ivory mallet. "This," I said to myself, "is a foregone conclusion; any one who plays with a fancy mallet, and that of ivory, is sure to be beaten." And in my conceit I thought I need not give myself much trouble about the game. Alas! I never appreciated the saying that "pride has a fall" until that day. At first I played with utter indifference, I was so sure of winning, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... not at his fond conceit, Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain; To him the unreal sounds are sweet,— No discord mars the silent strain Scored on life's latest, starlit page— The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sat motionless, petrified with solemn astonishment. Then the angel of death had really been there in that very room, and she had been "so wise in her own conceit," that she did not know it until he had departed with ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... pitied. I sobbed and sobbed as though some dam had broken inside of me. You see, Mag, I knew in that minute that I'd been afraid, deathly afraid of Fred Obermuller's face, when it's scornful and sarcastic, and of his voice, when it cuts the flesh of self-conceit off your very bones. And the contrast—well, it was ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... is plain that I deserve it?" bristled the professor. "Understand, Dixon, that I do not regret my modesty, even though it permits conceited fools like Corveille, who have infinitely less reason than I for conceit, to win awards that mean nothing save prizes for successful bragging. Bah! To grant an award for research along such obvious lines that I neglected to mention them, thinking that even a Morell judge would appreciate their obviousness! Research on ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... their possibilities on club essays. I often wonder if they attacked the proposition of housekeeping with the intention of seeing how much fun there is in it, of how much pleasure could be got out of making a home, not merely keeping house, and of feeding their conceit with the fuel of a determination to keep house better than any woman of their acquaintance. The simple but fascinating problem of how to make each room a little prettier than it was last week, would keep even an ingenious woman busy ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... out of conceit with the world, and who was never quite happy when other people seemed for the moment to be preferred to herself, thought this burst of affection decidedly theatrical, but she did not know of any one to whom she could confine her opinions just then; indeed, ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of God. Watch I say over the devil touching doctrines, for he labours as much this way as any way, for he knows that if he can but get you to lay a rotten foundation, he is sure of you, live as godly in your conceit as you will, and therefore, it is worth your observation, in that 24th of Matthew when Christ is speaking of the signs of his coming, he breaks forth with a warning word to his disciples, to beware of false teachers (v 4). The very first words that he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... nothing about such an origin. They are manifestly in great part the work of foreign artists. One well-known miniaturist, Antonio de Holanda, the father of the better-known Francesco, took part in the work, and having a good conceit of his own abilities (we shall probably hear of him again), reserved an entire volume to himself in order to give proof of them. The seven volumes which then were covered with crimson velvet and ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Mountjoy had predicted that he would be sure to flirt with the minister's niece. At that moment Anderson himself came in, and some ceremony of introduction took place. Anderson was a fair-haired, good-looking young man, with that thorough look of self-satisfaction and conceit which attaches are much more wont to exhibit than to deserve. For the work of an attache at Brussels is not of a nature to bring forth the highest order of intellect; but the occupations are of a nature to make a young man feel that he is not like ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... original here contains a neat little conceit, which cannot be translated, but which is too good to be lost. The French for daughter-in-law is belle fille, literally "beautiful girl." To Fougas' address "Ma belle fille!" Mme. Langevin replies: "I am not beautiful, and I am not ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin and when they would ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... me. How could a child like you read the Bible? It is a book for bishops and archbishops, and the Immaculate Father himself. What an arrogance? What an insolence of self-conceit must possess so young a heart? Saints ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... them, Scott, by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance; Though Murray with his Miller may combine, To yield thy Muse just HALF-A-CROWN A LINE? No! when the sons of song descend to trade, Their bays are sear, their former laurels ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... bored to death," he said, "with this man's ignorance and conceit. Don't pay the least attention to him, but there is one thing I want to take the first opportunity of pressing on you. Whatever is done or not done, however limited the funds may be, let us at least have a sanitary floor. You must have all these stones up, and put a foot or two of concrete ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... had reached the mature age of twenty-one, he was formally admitted to the House of Lords as a Peer of the realm. His titles and pedigree were so closely scanned on this occasion that he grew quite out of conceit with the noble company, and was seriously thinking of launching a dunciad in their direction. His good nature was especially ruffled by Lord Carlisle, his guardian, who refused to stand as his legal sponsor. The chief ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and if, as is sometimes unfortunately the case, the question is put less with the genuine desire for knowledge than for the purpose of exhibiting the acumen of the questioner, the form is strongly tinged with the deep orange that indicates conceit. It was at a theosophical meeting that this special shape was encountered, and it accompanied a question which showed considerable thought and penetration. The answer at first given was not thoroughly satisfactory to the inquirer, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... upon the deck. "And there," he indicated, with a backward toss of his well-shaped head, the corridor down which had passed the woman, "is his lady fair. I've even heard," he went on, "that she used to call him her 'fool,' quoting the poem. Pretty little conceit, eh?" His jaw, firm, square, set tight. Then, with a touch of deeper feeling. "She murdered that boy just as surely as if she had cut his throat; and the worst of it is that she can't be held legally guilty—morally, yes, guilty ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... to give out, as our newspapers say, a signed statement throwing a challenge to all Europe. I wish we'd get into a real war once so we could knock the conceit out of one of their so-called first-class powers. I'd like to lead a regiment right through the most sacred precincts of London; or take an early morning gallop through Berlin to wake up the Dutch. All this talk about hands across ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... unconsciously assumed possession of the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... me, and had discussed it very little with Marguerite, lest I might reveal an undue lack of wonder. But now as I thrilled once more beneath their holy light, the miracle of unnumbered far-flung flaming suns stifled again the vanity of human conceit and I stood with soul unbared and worshipful beneath the vista of incommensurate space wherein the birth and death of worlds marks the unending roll of time. And at my side a silent gazing woman stood, contrite and humble and the thrill and quiver of her ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... defines a condition of things in which an organism would never die—in which it would enjoy a perpetual and perfect Life. This to him is, of course, but a speculation. Life Eternal is a biological conceit. The conditions necessary to an Eternal Life do not exist in the natural world. So that the definition is altogether impartial and independent. A Perfect Life, to Science, is simply a thing which is theoretically possible—like a ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... it rather that Conceit rapacious is and strong, And bounty never yields so much but it seems to do her wrong? Or is it, that when human Souls a journey long have had, And are returned into themselves, they ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... unto this Fountaine about thirty yeares since, or more. For he also formerly had spent some time at the Spaw in Germany; so that he was very able to compare those with this of ours. Nay, hee had futhermore so good an opinion, and so high a conceit of this, that hee did not onely direct, and advise others to it, but himselfe also (for most part) would use it in ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... them—as if any man who has an appreciative soul would think of diffusing a compliment among a crowd of ten thousand people; but the vanity and presumption of some females are just disgusting. But for the secret consciousness that no one could have been intended but myself, their conceit would provoke me. As it is, let them have their conceity illusions. Others may think what they please, but I have an inner consciousness that is ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... and history, clever in reciting stories and poetry, but is a bold and skilful rider, a good archer and swordsman. There is scarcely anything that a young man should know, with which he is not familiar; and, with all this, he is free from conceit, good-tempered, gentle, and kind; in short, he seems to me almost perfect, and more fit to marry a princess than the daughter of such a man as I am. When I have seen my child happily married to him, I shall not trouble them with my society, but withdraw from the ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... me, may you, sir: and in my conceit, our whole nation should sustain the loss by it, if ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... China, this conduct aroused an insurrection of Chinese conceit against European conceit. The Chinese were guilty of the offence of calling the representatives of the proudest and most supercilious of all civilizations, "outside barbarians"; illustrating in this that too common conservative weakness of human nature, of holding fixedly to an ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... The Mogul, however, was very fond of music, and revelled in Robert Trulley's cornet, though virginals were not esteemed, "perhaps because the player was not sufficiently expert," and "it is thought Lawes died with conceit at the King's indifference." Nevertheless, on the whole, Jehangir behaved civilly to the company's envoy, whose success in obtaining an audience was quickly followed up by Aldworth in sending William Edwards, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... human ignorance, is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud; consummated science is positively humble. For this knowledge it is not, which 'puffeth up;' but its opposite, the conceit of false knowledge,—the conceit, in truth, as the apostle notices, of an ignorance of the very ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... was old? Ah woful Ere, Which tells me, Youth's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit— It cannot be, that Thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd:— And thou wert aye a masker bold! What strange disguise hast now put on, To make believe, that Thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But springtide blossoms on ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... tricks the herd Whose pulses first by murderous crime it stirred. Narcissus-like, the slayer bends to trace Within Sensation's flowing stream its face, And, self-enamoured, smiles a loathsome smile Of fatuous conceit and gloating guile; Laughs at the shadow of the lifted knife, And thinks of all things save its victim's life. The "Noisy Nymph," the Echo of our times, The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes, Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there, Watching Narcissus with persistent stare, And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... sympathize with, and to guide intelligently the main tendencies of his age, rather than violently to oppose them; at the same time the courage to present unpleasant antidotes to its faults and to keep from fostering a people in its own conceit; and finally, amidst many discouragements, the retention of a high faith in spiritual progress and an unwavering belief that the ideal life is "the normal life as we shall one ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... stoical indifference to these personal attacks. He made no speeches, he rarely exhibited himself to the public, and he kept his own counsels. His adroit, mysterious movements recalled the methods but not the conceit of Aaron Burr. Although Abram S. Hewitt, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, managed the campaign with skill, Tilden relied largely upon his own shrewdness, displacing old leaders for new ones, and making it clear to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... but most unfortunate husband, who honestly strove to do right, but whose extraordinary instincts were against him. Try it, Maria. I have thought the matter over carefully and well, and it is the only chance I see for you. It would have been a happy conceit on the part of Caruthers if he had started with his neck and broken that first; but since he has seen fit to choose a different policy and string himself out as long as possible, I do not think we ought ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... tribe, for it has no locomotion, stability, or endurance, neither goes to pasture, gives milk, chews the cud, nor performs any other function of the horned beast, but is a mere creation of the brain, begotten by a freak of the fancy and nourished by a conceit of the imagination." ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... great many ways," Victoria agreed. "If he didn't have such an impenetrable conceit, he might go far, because he learns quickly, and has an industry that is simply appalling. But he hasn't quite the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... inaptly, the evolution of the old ship of the line under full canvas into the modern man-of-war, sailless and grim, and the conceit is strengthened by the warlike build of the electric sweeper. It is easy to imagine the iron flanges that sweep the snow from the track to be rammers for a combat at close quarters, and the canvas hangers that shield the brushes, torpedo-nets for defence against ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... could have at such a time. Dale agreed that the boys were hard and careless; and he added that it was particularly shameful to bring up a boy's other faults when he was in disgrace for one. In the warmth of his zeal, he told how one boy had been laughing at Hugh's conceit about his themes, when he had shown to-day that he could not go half through his syntax; and how he had heard another say that all that did not signify half so much as his being mean about money. Between Hugh's eagerness to hear, and Dale's sympathy, ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... here," said the Trapper, speaking to himself, "it says here, 'Give to him that lacketh, and from him that hath not, withhold not thine hand.' It be a good sayin' fur sartin; and the world would be a good deal better off, as I conceit, ef the folks follered the sayin' a leetle more closely." And here the old man paused a moment, and, with his hand still resting on the page, and his forefinger still pointing at the sentence, seemed pondering ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... new. Mallet told him, that the newest piece was something called an Essay on Man, which he had inspected idly, and seeing the utter inability of the author, who had neither skill in writing nor knowledge of the subject, had tossed it away. Pope, to punish his self-conceit, told him ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... enlarged by the opening of the new houses, and the society of the beach was a little changed. In charge of the Catalina's house was an old Scotchman, Robert, who, like most of his countrymen, had some education, and, like many of them, was rather pragmatical, and had a ludicrously solemn conceit of himself. He employed his time in taking care of his pigs, chickens, turkeys, dogs, &c., and in smoking his long pipe. Everything was as neat as a pin in the house, and he was as regular in his hours as a chronometer, but, as he kept very ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... satisfaction of a turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of the lowest level of what could be called popularity remained in England to the writers of France, and he felt himself "entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the pretence" that a French school of thought survived in Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour in its vigilance ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... or of momentary inability to do what is wanted—are by nature or education impossible. His nature did not give him this endowment, and his education was of the very last sort to procure it for him. He himself, not out of pique or conceit, things utterly alien from his nature, still less out of laziness, but, I believe, as a genuine, and, what is more, a correct self-criticism, has left in his private writings repeated expressions of his belief that revision and ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... also according to the propriety of our English tongue so far as Grammar and the verse will permit. A significant comment in the "Directions" runs: "As for the fear of making truants by these translations, a conceit which arose merely upon the abuse of other translations, never intended for this end, I hope that happy experience of this kind will in time drive it and all like to it utterly out of schools and out of the minds of all." Apparently the schoolmaster's ban upon the unauthorized ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... on the steps of the Bourse, or when he closed the pages of his ledger. Suspicion was to him very much what his printed bill-heads were,—a necessity of the sale itself. His countenance presented a sort of comical assurance and conceit mingled with good nature, which gave it originality and saved it from too close a resemblance to the insipid face of a Parisian bourgeois. Without this air of naive self-admiration and faith in his own person, he would have won too much respect; he drew nearer to his fellows by thus ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... detestable, though many people would consider it decidedly 'chic,' to use her favorite word. I suppose you will dress your wife like a Spartan matron of the time of Lycurgus," added Rose, much tickled by his new conceit. ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... to handle the heavy guns of Hugo Grotius, and to untwist withal the tangled threads of Richard Baxter, in his encounters with John Goodwin he resembles his prototype in a leopard-hunt, where sheer strength is on the one side, and brisk ability on the other. And, to push our conceit no further, they say that this wary animal will never venture over a bridge till he has tried its strength, and is assured that it can bear him; and if we except the solitary break-down in the Waltonian controversy, our disputant was as cautious in choosing his ground as he was formidable ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... this quaint conceit, and then rode on quickly. In a few minutes he stopped and listened again, but heard no noise save the loud breathing of ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Mr. Malone: 'Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon society.' The concluding paper of his Rambler is at once dignified and pathetick. I cannot, however, but wish that he had not ended it with an unnecessary Greek verse, translated also into an English couplet[666]. It is too much like the conceit of those dramatick poets, who used to conclude each act with a rhyme; and the expression in the first line of his couplet, 'Celestial powers', though proper in Pagan poetry, is ill suited to Christianity, with 'a conformity[667]' to which he consoles himself. How much better ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." So spake he, clouded with his own conceit, And hid Excalibur the second time, And so strode back slow to the wounded King. Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily: "What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?" And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere: "I heard ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... light. Nevertheless, I got a clear enough impression of his alert, well-poised little figure, and of a hatchety little face, and a pair of shrewd little eyes, which (I thought) held a fine little conceit of his whole little person. It was a type of fellow-countryman not altogether unknown about certain "American Bars" of Paris, and usually connected (more or less directly) with what is known to the people of ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... from brand Till it is burnt out; Fire is kindled from fire; A man gets knowledge By talk with a man, But becomes wilful by self-conceit. Ha'vama'l. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... men whom he had most loved and admired,—of men who had dared to be independent, patriotic, and philanthropical, through all the temptations of political life. Would he be too vain if he thought to rival a Hume or a Cobden? Conceit, he said to himself, will seek to justify itself. Who can rise but those who believe their wings strong enough for soaring? There might be shipwreck of course,—but he believed that he now saw his way. As to the difficulty of speaking in public,—that he had altogether overcome. Some further education ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... three subjects of the quarrel, and have not all those been amply secured to them? Had they not at that time a mental reservation for power and employments? And must these two articles be added henceforward in our national quarrels? It is grown a mighty conceit among some men to melt down the phrase of a Church Established by law into that of the Religion of the Magistrate; of which appellation it is easier to find the reason than the sense: If by the magistrate they mean the prince, the expression includes a falsehood; for when King James was ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... the colored citizens of Toronto I know little or nothing; no doubt, some are respectable enough in their way, and perform the inferior duties belonging to their station tolerably well. Here they are kept in order—in their proper place—but their 'proceedings' are evidence of their natural conceit, their vanity, and their ignorance; and in them the cloven foot appears, and evinces what they would do, if they could. I believe that in this city, as in some others of our Province, they are looked ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... you say such a thing to me!' she cried hotly. 'Do you flatter yourself that, because I came here to talk business, I have also some personal interest in you? Surely even your self-conceit doesn't ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... ask whether envy is painful. 'Yes.' And yet the envious man finds something pleasing in the misfortunes of others? 'True.' And ignorance is a misfortune? 'Certainly.' And one form of ignorance is self-conceit—a man may fancy himself richer, fairer, better, wiser than he is? 'Yes.' And he who thus deceives himself may be strong or weak? 'He may.' And if he is strong we fear him, and if he is weak we laugh at him, which is a pleasure, and ...
— Philebus • Plato
... abrupt termination of his address on such a plea, and at such a moment, might appear an ingenious and rhetorical artifice. In his argument, Mr. Roebuck charged the government, the officials at home, and those in command abroad, with incapacity, conceit, and indifference to the welfare of the soldiery. When at last the house divided, the motion was supported by 305 members, and opposed by only 148, leaving a majority of 157—one of the largest, on a great public question involving the fate of a government, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... old,—a visionary man, full of schemes, with crude opinions and unbounded self-conceit, but poor and unknown,—a true adventurer, with many agreeable qualities, irregular habits, and not very scrupulous morals. Favored by letters of introduction to ladies of distinction,—for he was a favorite ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... pleased to consider abuses, however countenanced by high authority—and will obtrude his literary eloquence into our solemn courts of law, he deserves—what does he not deserve?—to be addressed henceforth by a name suggestive at once of ignorance, presumption, and conceit, as ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... before Pharaoh and said, "Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, let my people go, that they may serve me. If you refuse I shall plague you and your people worse than ever, and so teach you that there is none like me in all the earth. Don't puff yourself up with conceit, for you were made what you are only in order that through you my power might be manifested. You had better cave in at once." But Pharaoh would not harken. He tacitly declared that the Lord God of the ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... his "Love of Fame," very adroitly improves on a witty conceit of Butler. It is curious to observe that while Butler had made a remote allusion of a window to a pillory, a conceit is grafted on this conceit, with even more ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Her conceit was fairly colossal. The reforms in legislation for Ireland were, in her estimation, owing to her novel of Florence Macarthy. She professed to have taught Taglioni the Irish jig: of her toilette, made largely by her own ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... what he knows, but not in what he does not know; for in such matters he will be unprofitable to them, and do them no good. And no one will love him, if he does them no good; and he can only do them good by knowledge; and as he is still without knowledge, he can have as yet no conceit of knowledge. In this manner Socrates reads a lesson to Hippothales, the foolish lover of Lysis, respecting the style of conversation which he ...
— Lysis • Plato
... down the burden of our wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... vortices and length of arm, scotoma in the field of vision and exaggerated tendinous reflex action). Up to the age of thirty he led an irreproachable life; in fact, he was scrupulous to excess, and this, coupled with pronounced conceit and stinginess, was his only fault. He married a woman of common origin, who was not really depraved, but she was coarse and unfaithful, and, worst of all in his eyes, unscrupulous and wasteful. These defects, and her habits of lying and trickery embittered the poor man's existence. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... and so susceptible — and so tender forsooth! — truly, she has got a languishing eye, and reads romances. — Then there's her brother, 'squire Jery, a pert jackanapes, full of college-petulance and self-conceit; proud as a German count, and as hot and hasty as a Welch mountaineer. As for that fantastical animal, my sister Tabby, you are no stranger to her qualifications — I vow to God, she is sometimes so intolerable, that I almost think she's the devil ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... I suspect, be welcomed by every one except the gagged writers; but as the idea of its being operative is too chimerical for us to entertain it, and as the purpose of these pages is to expound the principles of success and failure, not to make Quixotic onslaughts on the windmills of stupidity and conceit, I answer my young interrogator: "Take warning and do not write. Unless you believe in yourself, only noodles will believe in you, and they but tepidly. If your experience seems trivial to you, it must seem trivial ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... word 'Immortality!' with a scorn that almost shook the poet's conceit, and thereupon produced an ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... those who live a happier, freer life than any his instructor can hold out to them is a moot point. Only the future can resolve the question, and judge of what we do to-day — no doubt with good intentions, but with the ignorance born of our self-conceit. Much of the misery of the world has been brought about with good intentions; but of the Jesuits, at least, it can be said that what they did in Paraguay did not spread death and extinction to the tribes with whom they dealt.*2* So to the task of agriculture the Jesuits ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... FitzHoward. "This room, you know, is all very nice; but it is a bore coming into the City every day. And then one doesn't like to be rung for like a servant. Not that I mean to put you out of conceit with it." ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... her. Now Lady Scatcherd was no fit companion for Mary Thorne, and though Mary had often asked to be taken to Boxall Hill, certain considerations had hitherto induced the doctor to refuse the request; but there was that about Lady Scatcherd,—a kind of homely honesty of purpose, an absence of all conceit as to her own position, and a strength of womanly confidence in the doctor as her friend, which by degrees won upon his heart. When, therefore, both he and Mary felt that it would be better for her again to absent herself for a while from Greshamsbury, it was, after much deliberation, agreed ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... singular and complete adjustment of worker and implement which, with other peculiarities noted or to be noted, gives The Faerie Queene its unique unicity, if such a conceit may be pardoned. From some points of view it might be called a very artificial poem, yet no poem runs with such an entire absence of effort, with such an easy eloquence, with such an effect, as has been said already, of flowing water. With all his learning, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... his conceit and careless in his courage, thought not to inquire, or, if he gave the subject any consideration at all, dismissed it from his mind as of little moment, as to what was the subsequent state of Hornigold's ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... object in being kept back at the post, that he might pursue his wooing. Satisfied of the wealth and social standing of the lady, he felt no doubt whatever that if given a fair field he could win her, and win her he would. If unlimited conceit has not yet been mentioned or indicated as one of Mr. Gleason's prominent traits, the omission is indeed important. He felt that up to the time of Truscott's coming his progress had been satisfactory. Officers and ladies were already making ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... acquired for Done was vastly increased by his rescue of Lucy Woodrow. Conduct that had previously been ascribed to mere conceit was now accounted for by most romantic imaginings, for it is a cardinal belief amongst men of their class that the true fighter is superior to all little weaknesses and small motives. When the girl crossed the moonlit deck to Done's side, the sailors drifted away out of earshot, and inquisitive ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
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