"Bombast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But let me tell you there is a point where a jest becomes an insult. I've spared you hitherto out of consideration for the feelings of your excellent father, who is so anxious that you should become an object of pride and credit to him; but if you dare to treat me to any more of this bombast about 'explaining your rights,' you will force me to exercise one of mine—the right to inflict corporal punishment, sir—which you have just ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... for art, leisure, and study." The "taste" and the "art" are principally those of the pseudo-classic style, an imitation of "ancient Greece and imperial Rome," which the French of the XVIII century carried to such unpleasant excess. The general characteristics of the imitation, size and bombast, are well epitomised in the principal statue of Montpellier's fine Champ de Mars, which represents the high-heeled and luxurious Louis XIV in the unfitting armour of a Roman Imperator, mounted on a huge and restive charger. Such affectation in architectural subjects is the death-blow to all ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and adapting the productions of others includes some dramas which have not been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... defend it."—(Ib). Nor were these volunteer Loyalists intimidated by General Smyth's extended columns of cavalry and infantry with which he lined the American shore, his marching and countermarching of countless battalions, and all the pomp of war and parade of martial bombast with which the fertile mind of General Smyth hoped to terrify the apparently defenceless Canadians; to which he added a flaming proclamation, not excelled in pomposity and brag by that of General Hull issued to Canadians three months before. We give this proclamation, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... out of sight like the white froth he was watching on the top of the ever-shifting waves? He had boasted of possessing a witness. Would they believe that boast and send a detective in search of him, or would they take his words for the bombast they really were and proceed with their investigations in happy relief at the loss of his ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... of the adventures of this restless soul amongst feminine masterpieces. As a soldier and a statesman his prestige in the English-speaking world is low, and we are apt to forget while reading the political bombast of the years of the war and the period after the Armistice that it differs in no respect from all other patriotic claptrap, except that it is the work of the greatest living master of Italian prose. Of this fact his early novels are a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society. I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he came from the Temple, his morals do show; But where his deep law is, few mortals yet know: His rhetoric, bombast, silly jests, are by far More like to lampooning, than pleading at ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... characters had all been prepared for a different sort of man. Our tragedy hero was a round, robustious fellow, with an amazing voice; who stamped and slapped his breast until his wig shook again; and who roared and bellowed out his bombast, until every phrase swelled upon the ear like the sound of a kettle-drum. I might as well have attempted to fill out his clothes as his characters. When we had a dialogue together, I was nothing before ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael. It is everywhere the same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted. In theology the early men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadence by infidelity—the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will be found in ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Felix Austria, with the mantle of the Holy Roman Empire still dragging from his shoulders, is no more than a puzzled, broken old man, crowded in this bad business beside the Grand Turk, against whom his fathers defended Europe. The preposterous Ferdinand, shorn of his bombast, is only a chicken-hearted assassin. The leader of the band, the All Highest himself, when stripped of his white cloak and silver helmet, shows the slouch and the furtive ferocity of the street-corner bravo. And the cry "God with us," which once rallied Crusades, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... by Ruffhead, to have told Warburton, that "Young had much of a sublime genius, though without common sense; so that his genius, having no guide, was perpetually liable to degenerate into bombast. This made him pass a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets: but his having a very good heart enabled him to support the clerical character when he assumed it, first with decency, and afterwards ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... puerility.' Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 443. He adds (ib. ii. 26):—'Burke himself always aimed at wit, but was not equally happy in public and private. In the former, nothing was so luminous, so striking, so abundant; in private, it was forced, unnatural, and bombast.' See ante, p. 104, where Wilkes said that in his oratory 'there was a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... overloaded, and at times silly. The statements are loose, the mode of narration confused and incoherent, and the moralizing is flat and common-place to the last degree. Yet there was a certain sincerity of feeling underneath all the bombast and platitudes, and this saved the book. The biography did not go, and was not intended to go, into the hands of the polite society of the great eastern towns. It was meant for the farmers, the pioneers, and the backwoodsmen of the country. It went into their ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... feared the work of Luther, and the rector of the University had pled for mercy. Luther replied that Leipzig deserved to be placed in the pillory[31], that he had no desire to make sport of the city and its university, but was pressed into it by the bombast of the Romanist, who boasted that he was a "public teacher of the Holy Scripture at Leipzig"; and by the fact that Alveld had dedicated his work to the city and its Council. Alveld answered Lonicer and Luther bitterly, but Luther replied ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... walk. "The key to an empire!" I said my own words over, and could have blushed for their tone of bombast. They were true, but they sounded false, I looked at my surroundings, and marveled that a situation that was of real dignity could wear so mean a garb. The sandy cove where I stood was on the mainland, and sheltered four settlements. Behind lay the forest; in front stretched ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... her adamantine soul unscathed, to the moment when she attains her destiny, namely, to spend a night of love with the dying Agathon Geyer and to bear him the first child of a better time, Beatus, the fortunate. Sultry sensuality and outrageous bombast characterize the work, the action of which is not clearly set forth, but floats in a sea of nebulous somnambulistic vagueness. Visionary representation and mythical creation are indeed the program which Wassermann lays ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... been telling the Croats, "then we shall not halt before we come to Zagreb, your capital." Those five will perhaps some day explain to their comrades how quickly Zagreb can be reached.... As yet those whom they left behind them had not lost their bombast: a manifesto was issued by them which declared that five true patriots had sallied forth to Saint Anna, for the purpose of parleying with the Constituent Assembly, and that in a barbarous fashion they had been arrested, maltreated ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... over the Reform Bill, as almost to threaten civil war. One minister talked of settling the question with 'broken heads and flaming houses.' Another boasted at a public meeting that he had 'got his hand upon the throat of capital'—all bombast, of course, but dangerous bombast at a time of great public excitement. Happily a vent was found for these angry passions in the ridiculous incident of Mr. Berry's 'embassy' to the Colonial Office, which set both parties laughing, and after three years of turmoil which had led to considerable ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... comment thereon, in prose and verse. The prose is generally bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... yet. Liberty, my dear Miss Rossano, will restore your father to health, and he will not lose his share of the glory." We English always excuse a foreigner who shows a tendency to bombast in conversation; and allowing for her partial knowledge of the language, and for the oratorical turn her people have, I saw nothing overstrained in the little woman's raptures. I had even a modified belief in their reality; and even to this day I cannot blame myself for having been deceived by ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... rooster is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be understood, he used to say that it was horror; and I am much afraid that ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... many to encounter," said I; "but they are not absolutely insuperable; and where is firmness of mind shown but in exertion? mere declamation is bombast rant." Besides, wherever I am, or in whatever situation ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in response to his rage and to his bombast Elsa had only silence for him—a silence which he knew must hide her real thoughts, he suddenly lost all sense of proportion and of prudence; for the moment he felt as if he could hate this woman whom he had wooed and won despite her resistance, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... "annexation split" in Germany. The Delbrueck-Dernburg-Wolff Memorial represented, to my thinking, nothing strange, or new, or abnormal, but rather the voice of natural and normal Germany making itself heard again amidst the clamour of foolish hatred and silly bombast in which present-day crises seem always to involve the contending nations. "Germany did not enter the war with the idea of annexation"—thus the Memorial opens. It is easy to scoff at this statement, because it is always easier in a crisis ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... the Aristotelian laws of the three unities," but was good enough to express his surprise at the powerful effect of his plays. "He is many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling, into bombast." ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... greatest power; though the melancholy is too dreamy to deserve the name of passion, and the terror of the infinite is not explicitly connected with any religious emotion. It is a proof of the fineness of his taste, that he scarcely ever falls into bombast; we tremble at his audacity in accumulating gorgeous phrases; but we confess that he is justified by the result. The only exception that I can remember is the passage in 'The English Mailcoach,' where his exaggerated ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... her. But he entrenched himself behind the Ole Fred gang and speedily helped to make it the nuisance of the ship. The germ of self-confidence and courage that was entirely missing in his make-up was replaced by bombast under the combined influence of whisky and boredom. Some day, perhaps, the iniquity of fastening up a small world of people in a ship for six weeks with nothing compulsory to do will dawn upon shipping companies, and the passengers will be forced to work, for their own salvation. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... only lucky ones. He put forward in support of this view the distribution of death, wounds and decorations in this war. This theory of history has in it larger elements of wholesomeness and truth than has, for instance, the pernicious bombast of Carlyle. I told my Sardinian friend that I had once heard it said by a most learned man that, if Rousseau had never lived, the world would not look very different to-day, except that probably there would be no negro republic in the island of Haiti. This saying pleased ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... of 1812 has been called by an able historian "the afterclap of the Revolution." The Revolution was, indeed, true thunder—a courageous and, in the main, high-principled struggle. Its afterclap of 1812 displayed little but empty bombast and greed. In the one, brave leaders risked their lives in that defence of rights which has made their enterprise an epoch in man's history; in the other, a mean and braggart spirit actuated its promoters ...
— An Account Of The Battle Of Chateauguay - Being A Lecture Delivered At Ormstown, March 8th, 1889 • William D. Lighthall
... particle, showing an insight into human motives which proved him a master in his profession. After the noon recess, the young lawyer from the city addressed the court for two hours, his remarks running from bombast to flights of oratory, and from eulogies upon his client to praise of the unimpeachable credibility of the witnesses for the defense. In concluding, the older lawyer prefaced his remarks by alluding to the divine intent in the institution of marriage, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... [let me add] into dry and indelectable affectation, one sort of these scholars assume a style as rough as frequently are their manners; they spangle over their productions with metaphors; they tumble into bombast: the sublime, with them, lying in words, and not in sentiment, they fancy themselves most exalted when least understood; and down they sit, fully satisfied with their own performances, and call them MASCULINE. While a second sort, aiming at ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... expressed in straight forward Saxon. The story, which is one of the chivalrous days of Spain, while it is devoid of trick is full of thrilling interest, and its style, while it is eminently poetical, neither swells into bombast nor descends to the foppery so common among the verse-makers of our day. There is a stately, old-fashioned tread in the diction, as of a man in armor, who, should he attempt to gather flowers of mere prettiness, would crush them at the first touch of his iron gauntlet, and who, if he seems to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... against his being given to an Anglican refuge. The scene at the mass-meeting to celebrate young Ginx's rescue from the incubus of a delusive superstition is described with rare appreciation of the foibles of character. The bombast, the cant, the flapdoodle and flubdub, the silly unction of different kinds of preachers are "done to a hair." Five hours the meeting raged, and at last a resolution that the Metropolitan pulpit should take up the subject, and the churches take up a collection for the Baby on the next Sunday having ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... ignored Milt. But at this absurd second intrusion on his decidedly private dinner-party he flipped to the center of the room and said "I beg your pardon!" in such a head-office manner that the pink-locked Mystery halted in his bombast. Claire felt wabbly. She had no theories as to where Milt had acquired a private jester, nor as to what was about to happen to Milt—and possibly to ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... after the haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries in Scotland, and was not at that time inferior to the best pulpit orator in England. While he lived ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... badge of his order, our friend became from that moment something superior, something exclusive, something supercilious, arrogant, exacting,—Asirvadam, the high Brahmin,—a creature of wide strides without awkwardness, towering airs without bombast, Sanscrit quotations without pedantry, florid phraseology without hyperbole, allegorical illustrations and proverbial points without sententiousness, fanciful flights without affectation, and formal strains of compliment without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Council. Lieut. Kerigan[665] was elected to the Royal Society at a time when his proposers must have known that his immediate object was to put F.R.S. on the title-page of a work against the tides. To give all I know, I may add that the editor of some very ignorant bombast about the "forehead of the solar sky," who did not know the difference between Bailly[666] and Baily,[667] received hints which induced him to withdraw his proposal for election into the Astronomical Society. But this was an act of kindness; {309} for if he had seen Mr. Baily ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Starr admitted it to himself with his mouth pulled down at the corners, the worst of it was that under the bombast, under the vituperative utterances, the catch phrases of radicalism, there remained the grains of truth. Starr knew that the masses of Mexico were suffering, broken under the tramplings of revolution and counter-revolution that swept back ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... underlying cause of all the world's great struggles: it had uncrowned kings, it had razed thrones, it had swept states. There were bits of distorted historical facts, fallacious but brilliant reasoning, and much bombast. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... about his ears. After this, he calmly worded on, seeming to regard the judge's stinging observation with the same sort of indifference as the lion would a dew-drop on his mane; and having poured out all manner of voluminous bombast, he gradually ran down, and came to a conclusion; then, jumping up refreshed, like the bounding of a tennis-ball, he proceeded to call witnesses; and, judging from what happened at the inquest, as well as because he wished to overwhelm a suspected and suspecting ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol or the insolence of King Cambyses' vein. To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a hundred pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and been more ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... a state that it would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beauty and poetic impressiveness. And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... companionship of woman. These are the essentials of happiness; but for its perfection we require both reason and sentiment. These theses are the tolerable portions, being discussed with some coherence. But much of the essay is mere meaningless rhetoric and bombast, which sounds like the effusion of a boyish rhapsodist. "At the sound of your [reason's] voice let the enemies of nature be still, and swallow their serpents' tongues in rage." "The eyes of reason restrain mankind from the precipice of the passions, as her decrees modify likewise the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... be expected? Where judges sob like children, and jurors swoon away with emotionalism; where floods of bombast—go to the courts, and listen!—take the place of cross-examination and duly-sworn affidavits; where perjury is a humanly venial and almost praiseworthy failing—how shall the code, defective as it ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... what odd creature they best can belie, 50 A thousand are prudes who for CHARITY write, And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,] One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire, And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire, T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend, 55 And just like a cobbler the old writings mend, The twenty are those who for pulpits indite, And pore over sermons all Saturday night. And now my good friends—who come after I mean, As I ne'er wore a cassock, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... wholly well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this—I knew it by all the torments ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... my people than myself. Can it be possible that he believes that proclamation will be acceptable to them—that mixture of cajolery and bombast. He has heard that we are ignorant, and he concludes that we are without understanding. What think you of his promise of abundance by the hands of Leclerc? As if it were not their cupidity, excited by our abundance, which has brought these thousands of soldiers ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... be worse! Nothing could be more shameful and disastrous. The Americans had evidently been expecting this useless bombast, and ere the words were well uttered, they answered them with a yell of defiance. I do not think more than one proclamation was necessary, but Morello went from point to point in the city and the Americans followed him. I can tell you this, Maria: ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... excellent. He was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their manner, and had learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in The Spectator and The Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had on the mind ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tragedy of his own life). The tragic note is sounded, with impressive authority and force, in the brief introduction, largo maestoso. The music, from the first, drives to the very heart of the subject: there is neither pose nor bombast in the presentation of the thought; and this attitude is maintained throughout—in the ingratiating loveliness of the second subject, in the fierce striving of the middle section, in the noble and sombre slow movement,—a largo of profound pathos and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... whose silly vanity would by no means allow him to put up with his not having been elected Commander-in-Chief, all on a sudden cried out in his sort of bombast, "Here they are coming, boys: now I will lead you to death or victory!"—actually a band of men was tramping ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... And so the bombast rolls, and one brags against the other like systole and diastole which balance each other in the same heart. But the worst of the matter is, that Prince Henry and Hotspur, as we have already noticed, have both the same soul and the same inspiring motive in love ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... return to our dramatic writers:... Thomas Kyd was the author of a tragedy entitled Jeronimo, which for the absurd horrors of its plot, and the mingled puerility and bombast of its language, was a source of perpetual ridicule to rival poets, while from a certain wild pathos combined with its imposing grandiloquence it was long a favorite with the people. The same person also translated a play by Garnier on the story of Cornelia the wife of Pompey;—a solitary ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Hoffman, and on the same day sent a battery of three-inch rifled cannon and 500 newly raised recruits to Sandusky. I telegraphed the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, our consul-general at Montreal, asking what he could learn in Canada as to the threatened expedition. He thought it was the mere "bombast" of Confederate emissaries and refugees in the Canadian provinces, and made light of it. On the 12th, however, the Secretary of War telegraphed me that Lord Lyons, the British ambassador, confirmed the report, and directed me to take energetic action to defeat the expected raid. The ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... said the prince, with bitter sneer. "Man, know thy station and thy profession. When I want homilies, I seek my confessor; when I have resolved on a vice, I come to thee. A truce with this bombast. For Fonseca, he shall be consoled; and when he shall learn who is his rival, he is a traitor if he remain discontented with his lot. Thou shalt ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... creed must fail that cannot recognise any degrees of mental capacity; that cannot understand that man has a soul that cannot be confined within any man-drawn boundaries. This German-creed sweeps the earth with all the bombast of a war-mad Kaiser. It is going to fail, but not till men who think will rise and fight for recognition of their immortality. It will be ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... circumlocution of the expression; for when we find the same pains and pomp of diction bestowed upon the most trifling as upon the most important parts of a sentence or discourse, we grow tired of distinguishing between pretension and reality, and are disposed to confound the tinsel and bombast of the phraseology with want of weight in the thoughts. Thus, from the imposing and oracular nature of the style, people are tempted at first to imagine that our author's speculations are all wisdom ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... societies need not neglect his regular college work, but in them can train himself to think consecutively, and gain facility of expression and an acquaintance with parliamentary law. If he makes faithful preparation, he will escape bombast and loose thinking and expression, and will become familiar with public movements, political questions, and social tendencies. For these and other reasons the literary societies should be encouraged, and students should ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... from the subject; you wish to escape the prison as well as the gallows, in spite of your philosophical bombast. ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... vse in Bezeneger is Veluet, Satten, Damaske, Scarlet, or white Bumbast cloth, according, to the estate of the person with long hats on their heads, called Colae, made of Veluet, Satten, Damaske, or Scarlet, girding themselues in stead of girdles with some fine white bombast doth: they haue breeches after the order of the Turks: they weare on their feet plaine high things called of them Aspergh, and at their eares they haue ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... will ever be preferred to those that must offend a chaste ear, and no polite discourse ever makes allowance for a filthy or sordid expression. Magnificent, noble, and sublime words are to be estimated by their congruity with the subject; for what is magnificent in one place, swells into bombast in another; and what is low in a grand matter, may be proper in a humble situation. As in a splendid style a low word must be very much out of place and, as it were, a blemish to it, so a sublime and pompous expression is unsuited to a subject that is plain ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... story of "Jonathan Wild" is really a bitter, satirical attack on what Fielding called "the greatness which is totally devoid of goodness." He avowed it his intention "to expose the character of this bombast greatness," and no one can deny the success of his achievement. Surely no story was ever written under more desperate circumstances. The evils of poverty, which at this period were at their height, were aggravated ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... action deal with one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing. He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a scholar's rather than a poet's temper, hating extravagance, hating bombast and cant, and only limited because in ruling out these things he ruled out much else that was essential to the spirit of the time. As a craftsman he was uncompromising; he never bowed to the tastes of the public and never veiled his ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... either to eulogize what the government has sanctioned, or to infuse something of literary immortality into popular enthusiasm, were in requisition on this extraordinary occasion, and, as usual, vied with each other in bombast and the fervour of exaggeration. If one might credit the legends, Sir Francis accomplished much more than a visit to the antipodes, much more indeed, than ever man did before or since. Witness an epigram on him preserved ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Boswell! at thy awful name The fainting muse relumes her sinking flame. Behold how high the tow'ring blaze aspires, While fancy's waving pinions fan my fires! Swells the full song? it swells alone from thee; Some spark of thy bright genius kindles me! "But softly, Sir," I hear you cry, "This wild bombast is rather dry: I hate your d——n'd insipid song, That sullen stalks in lines so long; Come, give us short ones like to Butler, Or, like our friend Auchinleck[7] the cutler." A Poet, Sir, whose fame is to support, Must ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza; but of the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable; he does not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on the subject of little children, he sings their innocence in great bombast, but he is watching them; the poetry over, the crowd dispersed, he will entice one of them ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus, Read what Flood the Seeker tells us Of the Dominant that runs Through the cycles of the Suns— Read my story last and see Luna at ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... one of the belles of W——, and, last evening, he openly avowed that to-day, he should 'carry off Miss Sybil Lamotte, in spite of her high and mighty family, and in the face of all the town.' Of course, no one who heard regarded these things, save as the bombast of a half drunken braggart and liar. To-day, young Evarts and his still wilder chum, encountered him just setting forth with his fine turnout and wonderfully gotten up. They jested on his fine appearance, and for once he evaded their questions, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... See him, ignoring its hidden virtues, eagerly seize and graft its most prominent vices on to his own besetting sins. Behold him by degrees adding cunning to his cruelty, avarice to his love of possession, replacing his bravery by coarse bombast and insolence, and his truth by lies. Behold him inflaming all his passions with the maddening drink of the white man, and then follow him through many degrees of degradation until he falls into crime ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic till at least a half century ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... thwarting their plans, to cross the border, as was the case in 1866. So they worked unceasingly and enthusiastically in maturing their plans, while they maintained absolute silence as to their intentions. The boasting bombast which had been so largely indulged in previous to the Raid of 1866 was not manifested on this occasion, consequently little interest was taken by the ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... indeed, convey a worse than inadequate idea of this wonderful oration, for they give merely a few fragments, in which they have contrived either to select their examples with the most curious infelicity, or to blunder them into bombast. But nothing can be more childish than to suppose, that Pitt would have given his praise to tawdry metaphor, that Burke would have done honour to feeble truisms, that Fox should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... grand words and to dress their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary expressions and the most outlandish, artificial, and rarest phrases. Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. With regard to their delight in bombast, and to their writing generally in a grand, puffed-up, unreal, hyperbolical, and acrobatic style, their prototype is Pistol, who was once impatiently requested by Falstaff, his friend, to "say what you have to say, like a man of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... lasted long in Spain, which, with its innate propensity to bombast, was more fertile soil for it than other nations. Innumerable poetasters of the early eighteenth century enjoyed fame in their day and some possessed talent; but the obscure and trivial style of the age from which they ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... welcomed him a little limply; something of the bombast had gone out of his manner. Tavernake's arrival had reminded him of things which he had ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... great advantage to clearness and force; if it is not parallel, any attempt to treat it as such is detected as a shallow trick. To search for thoughts to trail along in a series results in thinnest bombast. As everywhere else in composition, so here a writer must rely on his good taste ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... you but know how I love you, No more silly things would you ask. With my whole heart and soul I adore you— Idiot! goose! bombast!" ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... to awake to the fact that their countries have been living on the glories of their revolutions and traditions, rather than the substance of freedom. Behind the boast of old-age pensions, material benefits and wage regulations, behind the bombast concerning liberty in this country and tyranny in that, behind all the slogans and shibboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses of imperialism, woman must and will see the iron hand of that same imperialism, condemning ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... in the 'Tournament' I have also observed in Barrett, in the omission of a passage of bombast connected with one of the accounts of the Bristol churches. Your copy of the 'Tournament' being in Chatterton's own hand-writing is surely the best authority. We are now of one opinion, that Chatterton and ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—you've heard that before! Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd. It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... well in all you write, And swerve not from it in your loftiest flight. The smoothest verse and the exactest sense Displease if uncouth language give offense; A barbarous phrase no reader can approve; Nor bombast, noise, or affectation love. In short, without pure language, what you write Can never yield us profit ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... literature. Nature is systematically outraged in one and all—from beginning to end. Never was such mouthing seen and heard beneath moon and stars. Through the whole range of rant he rages like a man inspired. He is the emperor of bombast. Yet these plays contain many passages of powerful declamation—not a few of high eloquence; some that in their argumentative amplitude, if they do not reach, border on the sublime. Nor are their wanting outbreaks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the 'asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under {flame}.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity — but there is no agreement on ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... human still, certainly, yet genuine patriotism appears to be a sine qua non now, where bombast answered in the old day. Corruption is no longer accepted. Public men then were surprisingly simple, surprisingly cheap and limited in their methods. There were two rules for public and private life. It was thought quixotic, I gather from studying the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Theophrastus, Bombast of Hohenheim, known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings concerning Cosmology, Anthropology, Pneumatology, Magic and Sorcery, Medicine, Alchemy, and Astrology, Philosophy, and Theosophy, extracted ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... find us tossed into a tennis-court. These walls but t'other day were filled with noise Of roaring gamesters and your dam'me boys; Then bounding balls and rackets they encompast, And now they're filled with jests, and flights, and bombast! I vow, I don't much like this transmigration, Strolling from place to place by circulation; Grant heaven, we don't return to our first station! I know not what these think, but for my part I can't reflect without an aching heart, How we should end in our ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... day after day having passed the Prudential building, then fresh in the majesty of its soaring lines, and in the wonder of its fire-wrought casing, with eyes and admiration only for the false romanticism of the Erie County Savings Bank, and the empty bombast of the gigantic Ellicott Square. He had not at that period of his life succeeded in living down his architectural training, and as a result the most ignorant layman was in a better position to appraise the relative merits of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the fervor with which the officers and men roared out their hate chorus, "Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down, you dirty Hun." Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the expression of ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker moods ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... logic is assertion; his best rhetoric is abuse; his ultima ratio is to create distrust, and to involve both himself and everybody else in confusion. Genius, for example, he declares without hesitation to be trickery; poetry to be bombast; pathos, monotonous moaning; the tenderest human love to be sham; the most interesting natural incidents, contemptible inventions; the plainest statistical information, a deliberate act of theft; the ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... Philip's intelligence to insinuate that the Prince would shrink before danger, or die of fear. Had Orange ever been inclined to bombast, he might have answered the churchman's calumny, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... liar, but he told his lies on paper now, and hid them. He told them in prose and verse—prose which was measled with 'Oh's,' and 'Alas's,' and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... V.ii.790 (465,5) [As bombast, and as lining to the time] This line is obscure. Bombast was a kind of loose texture not unlike what is now called wadding, used to give the dresses of that time bulk and protruberance, without much increase of weight; whence the same name is given a tumour of words unsupported by ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... we men, "noble animals, great in our deaths and splendid even in our ashes," that we can not yield to a common fate without some overstrained and bombast conceit that the elements themselves give warning. Casca, in "Julius Caesar," rehearses some few of the prodigies which predicted ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the piece, the plot of which he had cleverly "adapted" from the Adelphi of Terence. In the prologue, which was spoken by Mountfort, the actor, whom the infamous Lord Mohun stabbed in Norfolk Street, the dramatist ridicules his tormenter Dryden, for his noise and bombast, and with some ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of these are over two pages long, except the last. They are written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery work; "Die Stunde sei gesegnet" has one of the most beautiful endings imaginable; "Mir ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... it was not unmerited. Ellenborough's theatrical bombast, like that of Napoleon at the Pyramids, recoiled upon him, bringing a hornets' nest about his own ears and leading to his recall. As a matter of fact, too, the gates which he held in such reverence were found to be replicas ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... who would not be convinced, so I accordingly gave them, as they say, "the length of their tether;" nay, to such, purpose did I ply them with proofs of it, that my conversation soon became as fine a specimen of pedantic bombast as ever was uttered. Not a word under six feet could come out of my lips, even of English; but as the best English, after all, is but commonplace, I peppered them with vile Latin, and an occasional verse in Greek, from St. John's Gospel, which I translated for them into a wrong meaning, with ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he Pindarized. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... admitting—at the same time, he was a very brilliant, and, even in many respects attractive, savage. His letters, though suffering like those of some other distinguished authors from being translated, are full of touches of fiery eloquence, mixed with bombast and the wildest and most monstrously inflated self-pretension. His habits certainly were not commendable. He habitually drank, and it is also said ate a great deal more than was good for him. He ill-used his unlucky ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... provided a somewhat solemn preface, in which they say: "The principal poems in this volume, under the title of the 'Echo,' owed their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation, and bombast pervaded most of the pieces published in the gazettes, which were then the principal vehicles of literary information. Willing to lend their aid to check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors conceived that ridicule would prove a powerful corrective, and that ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder |
