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More "Sententious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the sententious gravity with which the leader delivered his orders, and the self-important strides with which he passed over the land. He would have grinned still more, perhaps have laughed outright if he had understood that the occasional ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... presided. Loyal and dutiful addresses, expressing such sentiments, were presented to the young monarch by the city of London, the two universities, and from various bodies of people, to all which he returned sententious but suitable replies, declaring his fixed resolve to respect their rights and conciliate their esteem. A letter was addressed to him by the venerable Bishop of London, Dr. Sherlock, as a parting benediction, in which he gave him the following wise council:—"You, sir," he writes, "are the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... coarse character, rude as well as gross in speech, and given to practical joking. He relieved it of all the rudeness, if not of all the grossness, and reformed the joking altogether; but he also filled the Fool's jesting with sententious satire, and while preserving the low-comedy style of the character, brought it into keeping with a lofty and even a tragic view of life. In "King Lear" the Fool rises into heroic proportions, and becomes a sort of conscience, or second thought, to Lear. Compared even with Touchstone he ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... branches. He roved from walk to walk as chance directed him, and sometimes listened to the songs, sometimes mingled with the dancers, sometimes let loose his imagination in flights of merriment; and sometimes uttered grave reflections, and sententious maxims, and feasted on the admiration with which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... in the purely didactic side induced Herder also to remove the maxims from the stories which in the Gulistan or Hitopadesa served as their setting. So they appear simply as general sententious literature, whereas in the originals they are as a rule introduced solely to illustrate or to emphasize some particular point of the story. Then again a story may be considerably shortened, as in "Die Luege" (Bl. ii. 28 Gul. ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor, the grave apophthegm which is ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... stand nigh the muzzle of a big gun when she's going to be fired," growled Ben, in a sententious voice, and the secretary ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... sad set of scribes after all, and no great things in any other way. He seemed, as was natural, very much pleased with this account of his old acquaintances, and went away greatly gratified with that and Mr. Forsyth's sententious paragraph of applause in his own (Pindemonte's) favour. After having been a little libertine in his youth, he is grown devout, and takes prayers, and talks to himself, to keep off the devil; but for all that, he is a very nice little ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sententious side of the bourgeoisie already existed in the time of Charles VII. But cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried merchandise was destroyed, and fixed a fair ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... bringing us to about 1840. Then there swung a school of what we call the palmy days of old comedy, and in the '40's it dwindled to nothing, and England and America waited until the early '60's. Then came Tom Robertson with his so-called "tea-cup and saucer" school, which consisted of sententious dialogue, simple situations, conventional characterizations, and threads of plots, until Pinero and Jones put a stop to the ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... beneath or tree above assails the gentle stillness of its onward flow. Only that which comes from the heart goes again to the heart. We find a new and delicious personality, a simple Greek naturalness, in this exquisite dirge that scarcely owns the 'blasphemy of grief,' that are wanted in his sententious instructions and metaphysical wanderings. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... tell you what it is this year," he sagely replied. "It's diamonds in the heels!" He gave a sententious nod of his head. "I overheard Kathleen and her mother discussing plans. And—do you want to know next season's innovation? By George! I'm a regular spy." He stopped and laughed heartily ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... distraite. I answered him gayly, and then we changed seats, and he had a conversation with grandmamma. I do not know what they spoke about, as Lady Tilchester and I went to the other end of the room, but his manner looked so gallant, and I knew by grandmamma's face that she was saying the witty, sententious things that she does to the Marquis. A faint pink flush came into her cheeks which made her look such a ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... they to lazy folks, Who pour down on us gifts of fluent speech, Sense most sententious, wonderful fine effect, And how to talk about it and about it, Thoughts brisk as bees, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... my youth from my father, my uncle, and old persons who had lived in those times, that the Duke trusted the Duchess with the secret, and she her sister the popish Duchess of Tyrconnel, who was as poor and as bigoted as a church mouse. A corroboration of this was the wise and sententious answer of King William to the Duke, whom he taxed with having betrayed the secret. "upon my honour, Sir," said the Duke, "I told it to nobody but my wife." "I did not tell it to mine!" said ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and philosophy, which were cultivated at Athens with such extraordinary success, was regarded at Sparta with contempt. Long speeches were a Spartan's abhorrence, and he was trained to express himself with sententious brevity. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all! And ez to the child keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o' things," continued Joe, in sententious cynicism. "Ef an able seaman had fallen from the yard-arm that night he'd been sunk in sight o' the ship, and thet baby ez can't swim a stroke sails ashore, sound asleep, with ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... humour, and above all his poignancy of sarcasm, would have had great effect in a popular assembly; and that the magnitude of his figure, and striking peculiarity of his manner, would have aided the effect. But I remember it was observed by Mr. Flood, that Johnson, having been long used to sententious brevity and the short flights of conversation, might have failed in that continued and expanded kind of argument, which is requisite in stating complicated matters in publick speaking; and as a proof of this he mentioned the supposed speeches in Parliament written by him for ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... but concentrated for purposes of leadership. This proved, however, more than St. Cuthbert's could abide, and its mal-odour of "High Church" alarmed the Scottish Presbyterians. Going down the aisle, Saunders M'Tavish voiced the general alarm in sententious tones— ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... eloquence, or vntil I adioyne to this another tome, if none other in the meane time do preuent me, which with all my heart I wishe and desire: because the workes of Boccaccio for his stile, order of writing, grauitie, and sententious discourse, is worthy of intire prouulgation. Out of Bandello I haue selected seuen, chosing rather to follow Launay and Belleforest the French Translatours, than the barren soile of his own vain, who being a Lombard, doth frankly confesse himselfe ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... eruption, had previously gotten the praise for what was not his merit, so now this sinner was blamed for what was not his fault. Had the sub-committee waited till the crack of doom, it would have made no difference whatever to the general trend of Mr. Keith's sententious irrelevancies. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... had been watching me, studying my face intently as I spoke, his arms folded over his labouring chest. He had, before the close of a dignified, if somewhat sententious, address, recovered his breath, and completely his gravity. "My dear young gentleman," he said, "I admire your spirit as much as your person and manner. All three puzzle me, I must say. So young and so rhetorical! So simple and so ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... father, in his sententious way, cocking his eye as the cutter sped on its way towards the training-ship. "But jest you look at me, Tom, and see what forty years' sailorin', man and boy, have done for one o' the same kidney as them boys, jolly though they seems now. Poor young beggars, ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... the battles are real battles; but the language is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the market-place, its heavy jokes and perpetual sententious aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have lounged with delight through the narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with booths and barrows, sniffing with ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Artful Madge's sententious observation with regard to adversity was the fruit of bitter experience. Misfortune's arrows had been raining thick and fast about her, and although she was holding her ground against them very well, she felt that adversity was a subject ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... exchanged as they walked through a long corridor where their sententious phrases were repeated by the echoes; but suddenly a horrible uproar arrested their conversation and their footsteps. It was like the miaouwing of frantic cats, the bellowing of wild bulls, the howling of savages dancing ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... time made deliberative assembly a prolonged, never-wearying joy. The chiefs met in council like Homer's heroes—the commons sitting round and muttering guttural applause or dissent. The speeches abounded in short sententious utterances, in proverbs, poetic allusions and metaphors borrowed from legends. The Maori orator dealt in quotations as freely as the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, and his hearers caught them with as much relish ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... flush with hope and spirit, Who think to storm the world by dint of merit, To you the dotard has a deal to say, In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way! He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle, That the first blow is ever half the battle; That tho' some by the skirt may try to snatch him, Yet by the foreclock is the hold to catch him; That whether doing, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... are confident that we won't attack!" Westerling interrupted. He resented the staff's professional respect for Turcas. After a silence and a survey of the faces around, he added with sententious effect: "And I was right ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... councillors is the apothecary, a short, and rather fat man, with a pair of prominent eyes, that diverge like those of a lobster. He is the village wise man; very sententious; and full of profound remarks on shallow subjects. Master Simon often quotes his sayings, and mentions him as rather an extraordinary man; and even consults him occasionally in desperate cases of the dogs and horses. Indeed he seems to have ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... by Dr. Johnson "that nothing can supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will render knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible." This sententious apothegm is thrown out in contemplating the life of Savage, one of the English poets who united some of the highest requisites of genius with the lowest personal habits. But how much instruction does it convey ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... free and easy clubs met on Wednesday evenings at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street. It was somewhat in the style of the Three Jolly Pigeons; songs, jokes, dramatic imitations, burlesque parodies and broad sallies of humor, formed a contrast to the sententious morality, pedantic casuistry, and polished sarcasm of the learned circle. Here is a huge "tun of man," by the name of Gordon, use to delight Goldsmith by singing the jovial song of Nottingham Ale, and looking like a butt of it. Here, too, a wealthy pig butcher, charmed, no doubt, by ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... enforced by his tutors. A more powerful influence on the mind of the young prince than that of any of his tutors was exercised by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, his mother's chief friend and adviser. He was a fine showy man, vain of his handsome person, theatrical in his manners, pompous, slow and sententious in his speech. His private life was respectable; he had literary and scientific tastes, and a good deal of superficial knowledge. His abilities were small; he would, George's father used to say, "make an excellent ambassador in any court where there ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... Master Mumblazen appeared—a withered, thin, elderly gentleman, with a cheek like a winter apple, and his grey hair partly concealed by a small, high hat, shaped like a cone, or rather like such a strawberry-basket as London fruiterers exhibit at their windows. He was too sententious a person to waste words on mere salutation; so, having welcomed Tressilian with a nod and a shake of the hand, he beckoned him to follow to Sir Hugh's great chamber, which the good knight usually inhabited. Will Badger followed, unasked, anxious to see whether his master would be relieved from his ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... very simple. He spoke little. He usually expressed his meaning by short sententious phrases uttered in a soft voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came into notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he was required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This stammering, the incoherence of his ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too. Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the art of ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... neighboured it upon the West, as from the conquering spirit of the Turks which disquieted it on the East, it resembled Europe in its chivalric Christianity, in its eagerness to attack the infidel, even while receiving instruction in sagacious policy, in military tactics, and sententious reasoning, from the masters of Byzantium. By the assumption, at the same time, of the heroic qualities of Mussulman fanaticism and the sublime virtues of Christian sanctity and humility, [Footnote: It ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... a student of Kazan whom I had known in the days of the past, of a young fellow from Viatka who, pale-browed, and sententious of diction, might almost have been brother to the ex-soldier himself. And once again I heard him declare that "before all things must I learn whether or not there exists a God; pre-eminently must I make ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... although his orations were too florid to be read. Caesar was also distinguished for his eloquence, the characteristics of which were force and purity. Caelius was noted for lofty sentiment; Brutus for philosophical wisdom; Callidus for a delicate and harmonious style, and Calvus for sententious force. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... to the window, and in a sententious tone of voice,) "'Disorder,' says an ancient writer, 'occasions sorrow, and ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... "Business before pleasure," said a sententious member. "What's a programme to a matter concerning ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his contemporaries." "His sense of mental perspective is an extremely deficient one." "The manufacture of paradoxes is really one of the simplest processes conceivable." "Mr. Chesterton's sententious wisdom." ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... recent play, The Virgin Widow (1850), Mr Taylor declines from the promise of his earlier efforts. The preface suggests great things; but they are not forthcoming. There is much careful finish, much sententious rhetoric, much elegant description; but there is little of racy humour (the play is a 'romantic comedy'), little of poetical freshness, little of lively flesh and blood portraiture, and more of melodramatic ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Homais in "Madame Bovary". After passing through numerous transformations, an eternal idea at last incarnates itself in a final form. How splendid our alderman is! Never did a corporation produce so fine a flower. He is sententious, he is artistic. And how he lets fall from his thick lips those scraps of art-jargon which he picked up in the studio where he sat for his portrait! He is moral; he thinks that nude figures should not be sanctioned by the corporation; he believes in the Bank, and proposes ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... has been found powerful in war, and hitherto justice has been administered, and intimate union effected, domestic tranquillity preserved, and personal liberty secured to the citizen. As was to be expected, however, from the defect of language and the necessarily sententious manner in which the Constitution is written, disputes have arisen as to the amount of power which it has actually granted or ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Queen of Sheba, attracted by the reports of his glory, came from Southern Arabia to visit the monarch, she exclaimed, "The half was not told me." He was the wisest king of the East. His proverbs are famous specimens of sententious wisdom. He was versed, too, in botany, being acquainted with plants and trees "from the hyssop upon the wall to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... and Kopy-Keck was a spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty: the latter had generally the first ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... cigar to Tom, lighted one, and had begun to talk with a rhetorical and sententious balancing of periods—which, to his mind, full of the oratory of Prentiss, was the essence of impressiveness—when a negro woman entered the room. And hereupon ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... sublime Perpetual President in his red wig, and sublime supremacy of Pure Science. A gloomy set figure; affecting the sententious, the emphatic and a composed impregnability,—like the Jove of Science. With immensities of gloomy vanity, not compressible at all times. Friedrich always strove to honor his Perpetual President, and duly adore the Pure Sciences in him; but inwardly could ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... the genius of the language, and the true canons of taste. Political causes may co-operate in a revolt of this kind; and, as a nation declines in patriotism, so does its language in purity. It seems to me as if the sententious, epigrammatic style of writing, which set in with Seneca, and is seen at least as late as in the writings of St. Ambrose, is an attempt to escape from the simplicity of Caesar and the majestic elocution of Cicero; while Tertullian, with more of genius than good sense, relieves himself ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... heroine in A kind of state more awkward than uncommon, For gentlemen must sometimes risk their skin For that sad tempter, a forbidden woman: Sultans too much abhor this sort of sin, And don't agree at all with the wise Roman, Heroic, stoic Cato, the sententious, Who lent his lady ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... are urged first in a few words by Critias, and then by Prodicus in balanced and sententious language: and Hippias proposes an umpire. But who is to be the umpire? rejoins Socrates; he would rather suggest as a compromise that Protagoras shall ask and he will answer, and that when Protagoras is tired of asking he himself will ask and Protagoras shall answer. To this the latter ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... raised his eyes, and, while speaking now, in the same sententious manner, he seemed to be observing Mr. Cleaver's face very closely. "The fact is, my wife and I had no grounds whatever for expecting to be singled out for special rewards. On the contrary, it was never in my wife's power to ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... probably toiling after us somewhere; we could only hope the enemy might delay his attack until they should arrive. "He may delay his defense if he like," said a sententious young officer to whom I had imparted this natural wish. He had read the signs aright; the words were hardly spoken when a group of staff officers about the brigade commander shot away in divergent lines as if scattered by a whirlwind, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to relax their grip even when one's reason is prepared to discard them as out-worn. I am not giving utterance in this sententious fashion to distrust in allopathy; I simply am thinking of the qualms which persisted in harrowing my soul as I gazed upon my very beautiful daughter, and tried to feel proud that she was endeavoring ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... while of a coming night when he should tread the long-drawn corridors of the Tuileries; who made the miserable fiasco of Strasbourg; saw his poor, shabby eagle, forgetful of its lesson, refuse to perch upon his shoulder; delivered his carefully prepared, sententious burst of eloquence upon unsympathetic ears; found himself a prisoner, the butt of small wits, a mark for the pitiless ridicule of all the world —yet went on dreaming of coronations and splendid pageants as before; who lay a forgotten captive in the dungeons ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of gratitude, his place of trust, the stern admonitions of his sententious patron, Worthington, and the counsel of his only chum—a hard-headed young New York lawyer—had kept him so far from the prehensile clutches of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... taste as well as classical erudition Ascham preferred Sophocles and Euripides to the oratorical and sententious Seneca, his view was not shared by the renaissance. Scaliger, preoccupied as he was with style, found his ideal of tragedy not in the plays of the great Greeks, but in the closet dramas of the declamatory Spaniard. Seneca appealed to the renaissance not only ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... others aspiring to greater fortunes by her libertie and life;) the Queene our Sovereigne Lady, to declare that she was nothing ignorant of those secret practices (though she had long, with great wisdom and patience, dissembled it,) writeth that dittie, most sweet and sententious; not hiding from all such aspiring minds the danger of their ambition and disloyaltie, which afterwards fell out most truly by the exemplary chastisements of sundry persons, who in favour of the said Queen of Scots, declining from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... count-out. If it is a private members' night the Whips have no responsibility in the matter of keeping a House, and have even been suspected of occasionally conniving in the beneficent plot of dispersing it. But just now private members' nights stand in the same relation to the Session as the sententious traveller found to be the case with snakes in Iceland. There are none. Every night is a Government night, and weariness of flesh and spirit naturally suggests a count-out. The regular business of the Whip is to see that there are within call sufficient ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... tenderness and humour. Mike was also one of those whom life at the beginning had impressed with the delight of one kind of work and no other. When a mere imp of a boy, the heartless tormentor of a large and sententious stepmother, the despair of schoolmasters, the most ingenious of truants, a humorous ragamuffin invulnerable to punishment, it was already revealed to him that his mission in life was to be the observation and reproduction of human character, particularly in its ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... money should be but of an inconsiderable value, on the contrary would allow no discourse to be current which did not contain in few words a great deal of useful and curious sense; children in Sparta, by a habit of long silence, came to give just and sententious answers; for, indeed, loose talkers seldom originate many sensible words. King Agis, when some Athenian laughed at their short swords, and said that the jugglers on the stage swallowed them with ease, answered him, "We find them ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... something not only apt but quite prophetic in the last one, "Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." To suppose that Washington's character was formed by these sententious bits of not very profound wisdom would be absurd; but that a series of rules which most lads would have regarded as simply dull should have been written out and pondered by this boy indicates a soberness and thoughtfulness of mind ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... persistent, while the judge's last sententious remark regarding the recent subdivision of the estate awakened a new ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... talk, have taken prompt measures to resist. Well, even if lettered "Private Office" on the door, it was a public office in point of fact; and that public office was not for personal use or benefit he had the authority, in one sententious form or other, of many an Executive, from Jefferson down. So Elmendorf rapped, and rapped loudly. The clicking presently ceased, a light footstep was heard, then the voice of the ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are absurdly contrasted with the sententious solemnity of the despairing hero, crossed in the prosecution of his love-suit. His clumsy interference in the intrigues of his friend only serves to augment his difficulties, and occasions many an awkward dilemma. On the other hand, the shrewdness of the heroine's ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... on the stripling! how he apes his sire! Ambitiously sententious—But I wonder Old Syphax comes not; his Numidian genius Is well disposed to mischief, were he prompt And eager on it; but he must be spurr'd, And every moment quicken'd to the course. Cato has used me ill; he has refused His daughter Marcia to my ardent vows. ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... the most striking features of Tacitus, as a writer, no critic can omit to mention his sage and pithy maxims. Apothegms abound on every page—sagacious, truthful, and profound in sentiment, in style concise, antithetic and sententious. Doubtless he is excessively fond of pointed antithesis. Perhaps he is too much given to moralizing and reflection. It was, as we have said, the fault of his age. But no one, who is familiar with Seneca, will severely censure Tacitus. He will only wonder that he should have risen so far above ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... nodded approbation of this sentiment, and the younger Pliny, who happened also to be within hearing, uttered the sententious word "gosh" and clenched his fist, which was taken as proof of assent also, on his part. But, the Americans of the guard, all of whom were the tools of Joel's and the miller's arts, manifested a coldness that even exceeded the usual cold manner of their class. These ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts; [43] ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Harlequin, and therefore you are resolved never to put yourself in the way of winning more than such and such a sum a day." This light way of declining invitations to vice and folly, is more becoming a young man, than philosophical or sententious refusals, which ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... is a good thing to love the classics and devotion," he went on presently with a sententious air, "they are solaces in time of trouble. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... his fellow-man," replied Pipelet, in a sententious and melancholy tone: "and more particularly so when his fellow-man is so good ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... quit Paris and establish himself in Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves—a slowness of speech, and hesitation over words. As a slow and sententious enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack. He was brought back to Paris and conveyed to a "maison de sante," where he died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition, motionless, speechless; nothing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... edifying to hear nothing at a short distance than at a long one—sat 'Old Maxum', as he was familiarly called, his real patronymic remaining a mystery to most persons. A fine philological sense discerns in this cognomen an indication that the pauper patriarch had once been considered pithy and sententious in his speech; but now the weight of ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as in his ears, and he sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and eyes that seemed to look ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... obtain cheap celebrity. I always read these productions; they are pages of human life. The majority of the scribblers leave a name and nothing more: beyond that, some few of their productions are witty, some sententious, mostly gross. My thoughts, as I read over the rubbish, were happily expressed by the following distich which I ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... talk when folks die sudden," he went on, in a sententious tone. "It was as plain as the nose on your face that the Colonel, poor chap, 'ad 'ad what they called shell-shock. I'd heard 'im a-talking aloud to 'isself many a time. 'E was a-weary of life 'e was. So 'tis plain ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... up meat for me," said Seth in his sententious way, neither surprised nor pleased on finding this associate of his adventurous days here in this place of ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... well set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave his jaded horse a tap with the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... were being recited, after having stuck I know not how many naked swords upon the grave of this corpse, which was disinterred three or four times a day, according to the caprice of the first comer, an Albanian, who chanced to be at Mico accidentally, bethought himself of saying in a sententious tone, that it was very ridiculous to make use of the swords of Christians in such a case. Do you not see, blind as ye are, said he, that the hilt of these swords, forming a cross with the handle, prevents ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... event which we commemorate is all-important, not merely in our own annals, but in those of the world. The sententious English poet has declared that "the proper study of mankind is man," and of all inquiries of a temporal nature, the history of our fellow-beings is unquestionably among the most interesting. But not all the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... History of Hamlet, in the oration which Hamlet makes to the Danes after he has slain his uncle. "The situation of Hamlet is almost identical with that of Brutus after he has dealt the blow, and the burden of Hamlet's too lengthy speech finds an echo in Brutus's sententious utterance. The verbose iteration of the Dane has been compressed to suit 'the brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedaemonians.'"—Gollancz. As the English translation from which Professor Gollancz quotes in support of his theory is ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... of mine—who lived in Texas, though he went there from Rhode Island—used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You are changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and do you know ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; yet after all this divine rapture, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... "It is curious," she continued, speaking in a somewhat sententious voice, "how one is drawn irresistibly to one girl and repelled by another. Now, I was always drawn to you, Matty; I always liked you from the very, very first. I was more than delighted when I heard that you were to become one ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... concise, brief, short, terse, close; to the point, exact; neat, compact; compressed, condensed, pointed; laconic, curt, pithy, trenchant, summary; pregnant; compendious &c (compendium) 596; succinct; elliptical, epigrammatic, quaint, crisp; sententious. Adv. concisely &c adj.; briefly, summarily; in brief, in short, in a word, in a few words; for shortness sake; to come to the point, to make a long story short, to cut the matter short, to be brief; it comes ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... cousin of John Adams and the predecessor of Flint, had lived among his people as a chieftain. He was not only the spiritual teacher, he was supreme in most other matters. Unlike the Adams family generally, he had a rough wit and a sententious practical wisdom about common things not unlike the kindred conspicuous qualities in Dr. Franklin. If the traditions that existed in my boyhood were trustworthy, he said and did things that would have ruined an ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new role, he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence began with the unendurable "at my age," which ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... expression,—in the form of familiar proverbs, or embodied in powerful imagery,—a potent suggestive to the mind; not only whispering of duty, but, by perpetual recurrence, aiding the habit of attending to it? Is not the early and earnest iteration of such sententious wisdom in the ears of the young, —the honor which has been paid to sages who have elicited it, or felicitously expressed it,—the care with which these treasures of moral wisdom have been garnered up,—the perpetual efforts to conjoin elementary moral truth with the fancy and association,—is ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... or sing a song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the highest ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... laws, rendered perhaps painfully necessary by the political temperature of the times or the unforgiving suspicions of the past. But I am becoming sentimental when I ought to be humorous, contemplative when I should be characteristic, and seriously sententious when I ought to be playfully satirical. Forgive me, gentle reader, if from the collapse of the spirit, I have for a moment turned aside from the natural gaiety of my 24style, to give utterance to the warm feelings of an ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wish to carry home some bright illustration, some splendid passage, that deserves to be remembered. What has struck their fancy, they communicate to each other: and in their letters, the glittering thought, given with sententious brevity, the poetical allusion that enlivened the discourse, and the dazzling imagery, are sure to be transmitted to their respective colonies and provinces. The ornaments of poetic diction are now required, not, indeed, copied from the rude obsolete style of Accius ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... omni parte beatum;" "Omnes eodem cogimur,"—these and similar expressions remain in the memory when other features of Horace's style, equally characteristic, but less obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very position ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... appeared to many of us Westerners as a stiff, incomprehensible individual, resting his claim to immortality upon sententious nothingnesses directed to no obvious practical purpose; but, from the slight sketches of the manners of the times in which he lived given above, it will be apparent that he was a practical man with a definite ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... possessed Benjamin Franklin's immense common sense, and gift of terse proverbial speech, but none of his lusts and sceptical infirmities. The immortal twenty-line address at Gettysburg is the high water mark of sententious eloquence. With that speech should be placed the pathetic and equally perfect letter of condolence to Mrs. Bixby of Boston after her five sons had fallen in battle. With that speech also should be read that wonderful ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... Earle makes more of the reason of the thing, he[AC] is literally "swift and sententious"—he never takes the opportunity to draw us into an instructive disquisition, or to assume airs of profundity. And his passing hint as to the cause of what we see no more injures any picture he may draw than Coleridge's prose argument ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... it so. No word of song is possible, in that century, to mortal lips. Only polished versification, sententious pentameter and hexameter, until, having turned out its toes long enough without dancing, and pattered with its lips long enough without piping, suddenly Astraea returns to the earth, and a Day of Judgment of a sort, and there bursts out a song at last ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... too—had read much, and all that kind of thing. But he was not the sort of man you might expect to get on well with women. Unless with very intimate friends, he was a trifle silent and reserved. Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly bitter things when some careless joke was being made. He was a little dingy in appearance; and a man who had a somewhat cold manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously getting gray, and who was generally insignificant in appearance, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... generation in experimenting with the inductive, the subjective method in education, and the result is, to all intents and purposes, a dismal failure. The future will prove the value of the objective, the deductive—which is mine," he added with a sententious emphasis that left the puzzled rector no wiser ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... of the author, and a comparatively slight examination raises our estimation of his sagacity and wisdom. These essays, the last productions of his pen, are not unworthy of circulation with those of Lord Bacon, of which they frequently remind us by apt allusions, sententious definitions, clear-headed distinctions, and sharp antitheses, no less than by profound insight into the workings of human nature. We had marked passages for quotation, which our limits will not permit. One, however, we must cite, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of loss' deepened: 'it has been greater with me every year that followed.' He corresponded with his college friends, and of this date is a letter of remonstrance at his overstudious habits from the sententious H. D. Warr: ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with wit, As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it; Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonder's schools To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they be ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... and sententious, his manner so much that of a prophet, that Robert, in spite of himself, believed in the great impending danger that would come in the dark, and the hair on the back of his neck lifted a little. Yet the day was still great and shining, the forest tinted gold with the flowing sunlight, ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... brandy-and-water and pipes: and these came out in such rapid succession, that when Grotait drove Little and two others home, his utterance was thick, and his speech sententious. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... intrinsic merits be duly considered, different, far different would be my station. What! am I thus exalted in situation above my [sic] situated, (as I may say,) in the very van, exposed to the sneer of every satirical reader and sententious critic? Am I placed in a post so dangerous, and are contempt and humiliation my only reward? O, mankind, where is your gratitude? Think, generous reader, on the services I have so often rendered you: think how often, when you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... that she should be unhappy for a time, now, while she is young, than regret her name when she has taken mine.' His own words had a sententious sound in his ear and he felt that they were utterly inadequate, but he was fighting against heavy odds and did not know what ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... happy. The more patient his auditor was, the deeper he sank in his melancholy. A few times the sovereign light-heartedness of the good-for-nothing Finkenbein infected him for half an hour to the extent of reviving the grand gestures and sententious utterances of his golden days—but his hands had grown stiff, and the words no longer came from his heart. In the last sunshiny days of autumn he sometimes sat under the decaying apple-trees; but he never looked on town and valley now with envy or desire. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,—the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret ...
— English Satires • Various
... dinner. My bowels yearned with sympathy, and putting in his hand a small token of my gratitude and goodness, I departed with a hearty benediction on him, Dame Honeyball, and the parish club of Crooked Lane—not forgetting my shabby, but sententious friend, in the oil-cloth hat ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Mr. Hastings on his part seemed anxious and angry, both in one. He said to Dora savagely that he hoped it would teach the reckless fellow a lesson that he would never forget, and resented with haughty silence Dr. Arnold's sententious reply, that "it was likely to do just that." Then he openly and unhesitatingly regretted Dr. Armitage's absence, sent twice to his home to learn concerning his whereabouts, and was not improved in temper by learning that he was lying ill at Buffalo; and, finally, with much ...
— Three People • Pansy
... was the sententious remark of Inspector Val; "not a sign of him. But I've thought it out. Do you know why we don't find Storri? The reason is the best in the world; ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the only chance he'll ever have," was his sententious remark. No other word was uttered until they were inside the house, Mrs. Braddock's gasp of relief could not have ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... familiarly called, his real patronymic remaining a mystery to most persons. A fine philological sense discerns in this cognomen an indication that the pauper patriarch had once been considered pithy and sententious in his speech; but now the weight of ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as in his ears, and he sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and eyes that seemed to look ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... temporal authority. Later, in 1467, as the audacity of his opponents increased, the archbishop appealed to his brother, the elector, and to Charles of Burgundy. The latter was busy in France, but he wrote a sententious letter to Cologne, exhorting both chapter and city to be obedient to their chosen spiritual and lay lord. This intervention was resented. The breach widened between Robert and his people, culminating in actual hostilities. The chapter took ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... having treated of topics which are not generally considered as proper for epistolary composition. I admit this censure, provided, while I am condemned, Seneca also shares in the condemnation. Another will not allow of a sententious manner in my letters; I will still justify myself by Seneca. Another, on the contrary, desires abrupt sententious periods; Dionysius shall answer him for me, who maintains that pointed sentences should ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... being recited, after having stuck I know not how many naked swords upon the grave of this corpse, which was disinterred three or four times a day, according to the caprice of the first comer, an Albanian, who chanced to be at Mico accidentally, bethought himself of saying in a sententious tone, that it was very ridiculous to make use of the swords of Christians in such a case. Do you not see, blind as ye are, said he, that the hilt of these swords, forming a cross with the handle, prevents the devil from coming out of that body? why do you not rather ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... haughty Roman idea, the sententious announcement was thought sufficient for the purpose—and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... unhappy in another case. The situations in themselves may command our approval morally, but they certainly do not attract our sympathies dramatically. That a woman should demonstrate to a man in fine sententious language the expediency of marrying her, is not inconsistent with good sense, but it is displeasing. When a man tells a woman that, though love draws in one way, duty draws in the other, we may admire his prudence, but we are glad when so ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... set-up, rather ugly man, apparently on the wrong side of thirty, with pleasant blue eyes and a reddish peaked beard, laughed a little at his own sententious reflection, and then gave his jaded horse a tap with the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... created. It has been found powerful in war, and hitherto justice has been administered, and intimate union effected, domestic tranquillity preserved, and personal liberty secured to the citizen. As was to be expected, however, from the defect of language and the necessarily sententious manner in which the Constitution is written, disputes have arisen as to the amount of power which it has actually granted ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... heard and understood all that passed, though with Indian gravity and finesse he had sat with averted face, seemingly inattentive to a discourse in which he had no direct concern. Thus appealed to, however, he answered his friend in his ordinary sententious manner. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... would alone have carried conviction, even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... student of Kazan whom I had known in the days of the past, of a young fellow from Viatka who, pale-browed, and sententious of diction, might almost have been brother to the ex-soldier himself. And once again I heard him declare that "before all things must I learn whether or not there exists a God; pre-eminently must I ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... With that sententious maxim, which, indeed, he uttered in his native Italian, Riccabocca turned round, and renewed his soothing invitations to confidence. A friend in need is a friend indeed, even if he come in the guise of a Papist and wizard. All Lenny's ancient dislike to the foreigner had gone, and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... with men. When I found fault with their houses, and said, in particular, that I was surprised they did not build better churches: What would you be then, says he, if you found religion in stone walls? This will suffice for a sample of our conversation; and sententious as it was, you may believe I did not stay long to ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... appeared—a withered, thin, elderly gentleman, with a cheek like a winter apple, and his grey hair partly concealed by a small, high hat, shaped like a cone, or rather like such a strawberry-basket as London fruiterers exhibit at their windows. He was too sententious a person to waste words on mere salutation; so, having welcomed Tressilian with a nod and a shake of the hand, he beckoned him to follow to Sir Hugh's great chamber, which the good knight usually inhabited. Will Badger followed, unasked, anxious ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... really in love with Ferdinand as she has pretended to be, how easy it would be for her, without violating her oath, to put him on his guard against the trap that has been laid for him! In the scene with Lady Milford she appears as a pert little pharisee, caustic, sententious and philosophical beyond her years; so that one wonders why a girl that knows so much should not know more. She herself has just cast her lover off, after meeting his passionate entreaties with cool prudential argument. In a stagy paroxysm ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... seemed an individual exception; but an entire assemblage holding intercourse in dainty Parisian, exquisite as the famous dialect of the Brahmans. There was the graceful compliment, the antithetic description, the witty repartee. One could say the poetical or sententious without being insulted by a stare. Some of the ladies were beautiful, some were not, but they had for the most part a quite ideal degree of grace and many of them a kind of dignity not too often elsewhere found. Every person laughed and was happy through the ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... MILLA. Sententious Mirabell! Prithee don't look with that violent and inflexible wise face, like Solomon at the dividing of the child in an ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... its tom-toms unceasingly; for I was told Egbo had come into the town. Egbo is very coy, even for a secret society spirit, and seems to loathe publicity; but when he is ensconced in this ark he utters sententious observations on the subject of current politics, and his word is law. The voice that comes out of the ark is very strange, and unlike a human voice. I heard it shortly after Egbo had been secured. I expect, from what I saw, that there was ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... last resort, can be exacted by withholding supplies—not so uncommon a form of blackmail as it suits the dominant sex to imagine. Lady Harman's emancipation does not take the conventionally unconventional form, for some deeper reason, I think, than that her sententious friend and would-be lover, George Brumley, could not altogether escape her gentle contempt; indeed, she recognises Sir Isaac's claims upon her for duty and gratitude in a way which modern high-spirited ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... reading. His features had softened, perhaps, in their determined expression, but his square, massive jaws always gave him a resolute look. He loved to listen better than to talk, but when with friends he would always take part in the conversation, often spicing his sententious remarks with humorous comments. His sentences, at times epigrammatic, were those of "a plain, blunt soldier," but his vigorous economy of words lent additional force to what he said, and he would not ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... dictionaries, and have not by any manner of means lost their value. The guide to familiar quotations, the index to similes, the grammars, the readers, the machine-made letter-writer of mechanically perfect letters of congratulation or condolence—none are sententious enough to supply the need. By the compilation of this praxis, Mr. Kleiser has not only supplied it, but has furnished a means for the increase of one's vocabulary by practical methods. There are thousands of persons ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... not make him happy. The more patient his auditor was, the deeper he sank in his melancholy. A few times the sovereign light-heartedness of the good-for-nothing Finkenbein infected him for half an hour to the extent of reviving the grand gestures and sententious utterances of his golden days—but his hands had grown stiff, and the words no longer came from his heart. In the last sunshiny days of autumn he sometimes sat under the decaying apple-trees; but he never looked on town and valley now with envy or desire. His glance was far-away ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... play-goers. It was, however, as he found it, a very coarse character, rude as well as gross in speech, and given to practical joking. He relieved it of all the rudeness, if not of all the grossness, and reformed the joking altogether; but he also filled the Fool's jesting with sententious satire, and while preserving the low-comedy style of the character, brought it into keeping with a lofty and even a tragic view of life. In "King Lear" the Fool rises into heroic proportions, and becomes a sort of ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... recital of his wanderings began, more puffs than speech at the commencement. He was alternately picturesque and sententious until he reached Baden; there he became involved, from thinking of a revelation of beauty ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... answered him gayly, and then we changed seats, and he had a conversation with grandmamma. I do not know what they spoke about, as Lady Tilchester and I went to the other end of the room, but his manner looked so gallant, and I knew by grandmamma's face that she was saying the witty, sententious things that she does to the Marquis. A faint pink flush came into her cheeks which made her look such a very beautiful ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... approbation of this sentiment, and the younger Pliny, who happened also to be within hearing, uttered the sententious word "gosh" and clenched his fist, which was taken as proof of assent also, on his part. But, the Americans of the guard, all of whom were the tools of Joel's and the miller's arts, manifested a coldness that even exceeded the ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... no heed to poetic justice ... "the good and bad perishing promiscuously in the best of his tragedies, so that there can be either none or very weak instruction in them." Gildon sums up his opinion by the sententious remark that "his beauties are buried beneath a heap of ashes, isolated and fragmentary like the ruins of a temple, so that there ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... which, like poetry, is born in a man, not acquired—the result, generally, as in his case, of an innate power, combined with large, varied, and calming experience. Like most men of this stamp, he had both a keen sense of the humorous, and a racy talent for it; abounded in sententious, remarkable sayings; and had a dash of playfulness and eccentricity which gave a zest to his many solid excellences. The physician who attended his deathbed, often expressed regret that he had not kept a memorandum of his many striking ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sing a song, and philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, for example, "All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought of the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... we feel ourselves becoming wiser at every page, in the fulness of our minds we still perceive that our emotions have been seldom stirred by passion. The poem falls from our hands! yet is there none of which we wish to retain so many single verses. D'Avenant is a poetical Rochefoucault; the sententious force of his maxims on all human affairs could only have been composed by one who had lived in a constant intercourse ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... is, (to be brief in explaining my real opinion,) to speak in a well-arranged and suitable manner without good ideas is to act like a madman. But to speak in a sententious manner, without any order or method in one's language, is to behave like a child: but still it is childishness of that sort, that those who employ it cannot be considered stupid men, and indeed may often be accounted wise men. And if a man is contented with that ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... in the meantime had been absorbing. In the course of an earnest conference at the Tuscarora House the evening of the quarry accident, the Hon. Samuel Bowers had removed his cigar to let fall a sententious observation. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of that mind, you'd better go out and excavate the smallpox," was his sententious conclusion. "And if it's a hoax, you'd better——" and he ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... coarse paper, which had been ruled for accounts, and were smeared rather than fastened with very much salivated wafers. His writing too was very slow, and his choice of language not extensive; a letter on such a subject from a brother to a sister should be well turned, impressive, terse, sententious: that scheme would ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... as they walked through a long corridor where their sententious phrases were repeated by the echoes; but suddenly a horrible uproar arrested their conversation and their footsteps. It was like the miaouwing of frantic cats, the bellowing of wild bulls, the howling of savages dancing the war-dance—a frightful tempest of human yells, repeated and ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Lord Acton's. They contain the essence of his unceasing labours in collecting, comparing, and testing an immense quantity of historic material. They are particularly valuable for the flashes of insight into the deeper relations of events, for brief, sententious observations in which he sums up his judgments upon men and their doings. They are not to be taken lightly; they demand all your attention, for the style is compressed and packed with meaning; and the author seems to expect his ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... friend of mine—who lived in Texas, though he went there from Rhode Island—used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You are changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody to read, nobody to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... first in a few words by Critias, and then by Prodicus in balanced and sententious language: and Hippias proposes an umpire. But who is to be the umpire? rejoins Socrates; he would rather suggest as a compromise that Protagoras shall ask and he will answer, and that when Protagoras is tired of asking he himself will ask and Protagoras shall answer. To this ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... practice of mimicry; and there was in it a very attractive blending of tenderness and humour. Mike was also one of those whom life at the beginning had impressed with the delight of one kind of work and no other. When a mere imp of a boy, the heartless tormentor of a large and sententious stepmother, the despair of schoolmasters, the most ingenious of truants, a humorous ragamuffin invulnerable to punishment, it was already revealed to him that his mission in life was to be the observation and reproduction of human character, particularly ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... favourites of Heaven interesting in their happy state, while yet the key that was to admit them to our world of adventure and experience, of suffering and achievement, hung untouched on a tree. And Adam, from the wealth of his inexperience, is lavishly sententious; when anything is to do, even if it is only to go to sleep, he does it in a high style, and makes a speech. Milton plainly saw the danger of arousing a sense of incongruity and ludicrous disproportion from the contest between these harmless tame creatures and the great forces of Satan's empire. ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... stripling! how he apes his sire! Ambitiously sententious—But I wonder Old Syphax comes not; his Numidian genius Is well disposed to mischief, were he prompt And eager on it; but he must be spurr'd, And every moment quicken'd to the course. Cato has used me ill; he has refused His daughter Marcia to my ardent vows. Besides, his baffled ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... curious that he even ventured to ask the pilot in a low voice. The pilot turned out to be a good-natured specimen of his kind, condescending, sententious. He had been down to his meals in the main cabin, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... there, they were careful to inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so, and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor, the grave apophthegm ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by his side, observed, in his usual tone of sententious consolation, "It is unwise to look back when the journey lieth forward;" and as he spoke, the horse of the knight made such a perilous stumble as threatened to add a practical moral to ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... have proved the strength of my brother," was the sententious reply. "Where goes my brother through the woods, which are full of danger to him to-night? ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... in the conflict of wills. Could such a play as the "Suppliants" of Euripedes find any aesthetic justification, save that it has the one dramatic essential—confrontation, balance of emotions? The very scenes of short speeches, of objurgation or sententious repartee, which cannot but have for us an element of the grotesque, must have been as pleasing as they were to the Greek audience, from the fact that they brought to sharpest vision the confrontation of the two antagonists. The mediaeval drama, which has become popularly known in "Everyman," ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... down a hearty cup. What shall we do? If Comedy forsake us, They'll turn us out, and no one else will take us. But why can't I be moral?—Let me try— My heart thus pressing—fixed my face and eye— With a sententious look, that nothing means, (Faces are blocks in sentimental scenes) Thus I begin: "All is not gold that glitters, "Pleasure seems sweet, but proves a glass of bitters. "When Ignorance enters, Folly is at hand: "Learning is better far than ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... things over which Avdotia and Katenka would laugh and jest with Dubkoff from one end of an evening to the other. I should have remembered that seldom did an evening pass but Dubkoff would first have, an argument about something, and then read in a sententious voice either some verses beginning "Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive" or extracts from The Demon. In short, I should have remembered what nonsense they used to chatter ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... popular assembly; and that the magnitude of his figure, and striking peculiarity of his manner, would have aided the effect. But I remember it was observed by Mr. Flood, that Johnson, having been long used to sententious brevity and the short flights of conversation, might have failed in that continued and expanded kind of argument, which is requisite in stating complicated matters in publick speaking; and as a proof of this he mentioned the supposed speeches in Parliament written ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... flushed with hope and spirit, Who think to storm the world by dint of merit, To you the dotard has a deal to say, In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way; He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle, That the first blow is ever half the battle: That tho' some by the skirt may try to snatch him, Yet by the forelock is the hold to catch him; That ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes—the epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of aphorisms, instruction us ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a rude little tale which Giovanni Verga wrote and which supplied the librettists, G. Targioni-Tozzetti and G. Menasci, with the plot of Mascagni's opera. Sententious as the opera seems, it is yet puffed out, padded, and bedizened with unessential ornament compared with the story. This has the simplicity and directness of a folk-tale or folk-song, and much of its characteristic color and strength were lost in fitting it out for music. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... on hearing his wife's voluble descriptions later of Madeline's "grand" young man failed to be suitably impressed. "Them swells don't mean no girl no good no time," he had summed up his views with sententious accumulation of negatives. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... to Mrs Hurst's house. Dornton and the Dornton people seemed to her at that moment almost unbearable. Should she ever get away from them? she wondered. Would her life be spent within the hearing of Mrs Winn's sententious remarks, the tedious discussions of tiny details, the eternal chatter and gossip, which still seemed to buzz in her ears, from the meeting that afternoon? Then her thoughts turned to their usual refuge, the Professor, ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... the people over whom he presided. Loyal and dutiful addresses, expressing such sentiments, were presented to the young monarch by the city of London, the two universities, and from various bodies of people, to all which he returned sententious but suitable replies, declaring his fixed resolve to respect their rights and conciliate their esteem. A letter was addressed to him by the venerable Bishop of London, Dr. Sherlock, as a parting benediction, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is no pain. I don't mean to be sententious, but this is the death-grapple that is coming. They will need me ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... This sententious answer struck them with astonishment, as I expected it would, and they looked at ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... aside his pipe, for he still retained a little of his treasured tobacco, and in a slow, sententious tone repeated one of those tribal legends which are all that keep alive the fire of patriotism and national pride, in the breasts of a people who find themselves strangers, outcasts, and without a country in the land of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... put that curling brow down; You can't, for the soul of you, learn how to frown. Well, first I premise, it's my honest conviction, That my breast is a chaos of all contradiction; Religious—deistic—now loyal and warm; Then a dagger-drawn democrat hot for reform: This moment a fop, that, sententious as Titus; Democritus now, and anon Heraclitus; Now laughing and pleased, like a child with a rattle; Then vex'd to the soul with impertinent tattle; Now moody and sad, now unthinking and gay, To all points of the compass I ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... medicine at Leyden, and had visited England and France, he published a small collection of poems entitled Versuch Schweizerischer Gedichten. They are characterized by moral fervor, trenchant thought, and sententious pregnancy of expression—a new combination up to that time. Haller is at his best in The Alps, which, notwithstanding its abundant description, is not so much a landscape poem as a philosophic eulogy of the simple ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... summing up their results, proceeded to unfold her own view. Her opening was deliberate, like the progress of some massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality. Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was affluent in historic illustration ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious] I know not well what degree of respect Shakespeare intends to obtain for this vicar, but he has here put into his mouth a finished representation of colloquial excellence. It is very difficult to add any thing to this character of the school-master's table-talk, and ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... this unexpected fall, was just beginning to show his mettle. The sententious graybeard was never quite so happy, never looked quite so wise, never shook his head with such an air of good-humored consequence, never winked with such profundity of facetiousness, as when "the laal limber Frenchman" was ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the effect of moonlight, which at the proper times flooded the stage with its rays or left it in darkness. Every detail was excellently and exactly reproduced. The scene was shifted, and Hamlet began his allusions, his sallies of sarcasm, his sententious sayings, his points of satire with the courtiers, who sought to study and to penetrate the sentiments of the young prince. In this scene Irving was simply sublime. His mobile face mirrored his thoughts. The subtle penetration of his phrases, so perfect in shading and incisiveness, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... my attention, in 1890, or thereabouts, to the delightful stylistic qualities of those worthies. Many of his colors are from their ink-horns, in which the pigments were of deep and varied hues. When he is sententious and didactic he seems to have caught something of Emerson's manner. And indeed there is in all his writings a flavor of optimism and a slightly dogmatic, even when thoroughly gentle and persuasive, tone which he has in common ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... state more awkward than uncommon, For gentlemen must sometimes risk their skin For that sad tempter, a forbidden woman: Sultans too much abhor this sort of sin, And don't agree at all with the wise Roman, Heroic, stoic Cato, the sententious, Who lent his lady to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... what he always said to them, and they always said, "Yes, thank you," following out instructions received on the way down town, and then, in some desperation, added, "Mr. Bingle," after a sententious whisper from ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... blanket around him, and with a piercing eye surveyed the multitude. All was hushed. Nothing interposed to break the silence, but the rustling of the leaves. After a long and solemn, but not unmeaning pause, he commenced in a low voice, and sententious style. Rising gradually with the subject, he depicted the primitive simplicity and happiness of his nation, and the wrongs they had sustained from the usurpations of white men, with such a bold and ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... anxious to prevent the passage of an international copy-right law. As might be anticipated of such an advocate, his real reasons are all based upon the argumentum ad crumenam, the argument to the purse. Mr. ADAMSON, in a few satirical, well-reasoned, sententious paragraphs, has fairly demolished the superstructure which Selfishness had reared, and exposed the misrepresentations upon which alone the unsubstantial fabric could have rested. It is quiet and good-natured, but cutting; and will act as an ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... alarmed for the safety of the cartoons, and many people were unable to gain admission at all. However, order was soon established, and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson stepped up on to the platform and in a few pleasantly sententious phrases introduced Mr. Crane as one who had always been 'the advocate of great and unpopular causes,' and the aim of whose art was 'joy in widest commonalty spread.' Mr. Crane began his lecture by pointing out that Art had two fields, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... even in connection with a subject remote from his ordinary field, and here as elsewhere he shows himself prone to quote from the drama.[160] But Scott was interested in plays for what he found in them of characters and manners, of witty and sententious speech, of situations and incidents, and only secondarily in the technical aspects of the drama. Reading his novels we could guess that he would care more for the concrete elements of a play than for the orderly march of events through the various ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... incompetent share of learning' for a profession in which, we are told, he aspired to eminence. The swift disappointment of these brave hopes, the fast coming years of sickness, distress, and grief endow the old chambers with something of tragedy; but in June, 1740, the shadows were still but a sententious word on ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of Peter Bell. Reynolds's whole pamphlet—preface, text, and notes—is excessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tender points. It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and it ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... a clear and concise expression,—in the form of familiar proverbs, or embodied in powerful imagery,—a potent suggestive to the mind; not only whispering of duty, but, by perpetual recurrence, aiding the habit of attending to it? Is not the early and earnest iteration of such sententious wisdom in the ears of the young, —the honor which has been paid to sages who have elicited it, or felicitously expressed it,—the care with which these treasures of moral wisdom have been garnered up,—the perpetual efforts ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... spirit lofty converse hold With after times.—The patriot shall feel My stern alarum, and unsheath his steel; Or, in the senate thunder out my numbers To startle princes from their easy slumbers. The sage will mingle with each moral theme My happy thoughts sententious; he will teem With lofty periods when my verses fire him, And then I'll stoop from heaven to inspire him. Lays have I left of such a dear delight That maids will sing them on their bridal night. Gay villagers, ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... sayings too slight, perhaps, to deserve record; yet," etc. By an "apophthegm" was meant originally a terse (sententious) remark, but the word ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... list of dramatis personae a character bearing a strong resemblance to Euphues, the pretended author of the romance. "Like Euphues, Jaques has made false steps in youth, which have somewhat darkened his views of life; like Euphues, he conceals under a veil of sententious satire a real goodness of heart, shown in his action toward Audrey and Touchstone. A traveler, like Euphues, he has a melancholy of his own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and is prepared, like his prototype, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... apply for the position. It would take about five minutes to put out that independent Amanda Reist and vote in the other girl—it just takes some people to plan! He, Mr. Mertzheimer, had planned it! Probably in his limited education he had never read that sententious line regarding what often happens to the best laid plans ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... did, in an exaggerated and distorted form, he straightway ceased his visits. Thus he was wholly unprepared for the family's hurried departure, the news of which was broken to him by Maurice. Dove was dumbfounded. Not a single sententious phrase crossed his lips; and he remained unashamed of the moisture that dimmed his eyes. But he maintained his bearing commendably; and it was impossible not to admire the upright, manly air with which he walked ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the house asked for his nephew and endeavoured to persuade Lord Mistletoe to go with him to the interview. But Lord Mistletoe was as firm in refusing as had been Sir George Penwether. "You are quite wrong," said the young man with well-informed sententious gravity. "I could do nothing to help you. You are Arabella's father and no one can plead her cause but yourself." Lord Augustus dropped his eyebrows over his eyes as this was said. They who knew him well and had seen the same thing done when his partner would not answer his call ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... commonplaces of etiquette and good manners, but there is something not only apt but quite prophetic in the last one, "Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience." To suppose that Washington's character was formed by these sententious bits of not very profound wisdom would be absurd; but that a series of rules which most lads would have regarded as simply dull should have been written out and pondered by this boy indicates a soberness and thoughtfulness ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... present, and holding it up, descried the person who spoke, a tall woman, who evidently endeavoured to render herself remarkable. When he approached her, she communicated her intelligence in a grave and sententious tone of voice. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... laughs aloud, and offers you a piece of Bologna sausage. As in real life, so in his writings,—the serious and the comic, the sublime and the grotesque, the pathetic and the ludicrous are mingled together. At times he is sententious, energetic, simple; then again, obscure and diffuse. His thoughts are like mummies embalmed in spices, and wrapped about with curious envelopements; but within these the thoughts themselves are kings. At times glad, beautiful images, airy forms, move by you, graceful, harmonious;—at ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and, doubtless, very true, as well as sententious and profound. But hark you, Mr. Wiseman, to something not dreamt of in your philosophy! We women dress, not to be simple, genuine, and harmonious, or even to please you men, but to brave each other's criticism; and so, when the time comes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Fanny. "It is curious," she continued, speaking in a somewhat sententious voice, "how one is drawn irresistibly to one girl and repelled by another. Now, I was always drawn to you, Matty; I always liked you from the very, very first. I was more than delighted when I heard that you were to become one ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... so earnest and sententious, his manner so much that of a prophet, that Robert, in spite of himself, believed in the great impending danger that would come in the dark, and the hair on the back of his neck lifted a little. Yet the day was still great and shining, the forest tinted gold with the flowing sunlight, ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of the narrator, like the stone descending the shaft, gathers accelerated velocity with its momentum toward the last, and so expends itself in a more brief and sententious manner than in the commencement. It should be also, but rarely is, more powerful, and more condensed ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use the language, and are probably most often used without any ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Blind Melesigenes thence Homer call'd, Whose Poem Phoebus challeng'd for his own. 260 Thence what the lofty grave Tragoedians taught In Chorus or Iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd In brief sententious precepts, while they treat Of fate, and chance, and change in human life; High actions, and high passions best describing; Thence to the famous Orators repair, Those antient, whose resistless eloquence ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
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