"Craftiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... noiseless manner related, and then it appeared to be momentarily exhausted. Even the doublings of the canoe had been as much the consequence of an uncertain hand and of nervous agitation, as of any craftiness or calculation. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... newspapers devote leaders to it, and the comic papers have pictures, and sometimes even jokes about it, and you would think the whole population of these islands struck work and went a-shooting with gillies and dogs and appropriate costume. But that is the craftiness of the editors, from Mr. Buckle and Mr. Yates down to the editor of the Halfpenny Democrat—they make the humblest of us feel we are in the best sets, so we all come up to town for the season, and are seen at three parties a night, and we ride in the Park, and we ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... effective. If the copse indeed be empty no harm is done, beyond the abortive expenditure of a few rounds of ammunition: if it be occupied, the fruits of the manoeuvre are attractive. Cunning is matched against cunning, and the struggle for supremacy in the art of craftiness is keen. ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... and sun to shine together, Snowflakes to knit for apples on bare boughs, Yea, love to thrive upon the terms of hate. If I had fared abroad I should have found In many countries many marvels for you— Though not more comeliness in peopled Romeborg And not more haughtiness in Mickligarth Nor craftiness in all the isles of the world, And only golden coifs in Athcliath: Yet you were ardent that I should not sail, And when I could not sail you laughed out loud And ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... I be calm when I realize that I have been robbed of the work of years by the craftiness of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... copiously by Scriptural examples—as Pharaoh, the King of Babylon, the Kings of Israel—who most completely ruined themselves at the moment when by wisest counsels they were zealous to strengthen and pacify their kingdoms. For it is He who taketh the wise in their own craftiness, and overturns the mountains before they know it. Therefore it is needful to fear God. I do not say these things because my teaching or admonition is necessary to persons of such eminence, but because I ought not to withhold from Germany my due obedience. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal from his father, a judge at Alencon. Then the satirical meaning hidden beneath Pere Fourchon's apparent guilelessness came back to him, and he owned himself "gulled" by the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... did she affect a display of frankness, surprise, and fear. Her expression would have been simply perfect, had it not been for her eyes, her small gray eyes, as restless as those of a caged animal, and gleaming at intervals with craftiness ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... bitter—Jud! The big bully of a boy had learned that David was his equal physically and his superior mentally, but the fear of David and of David's good standing kept him from venturing out in the open; so from cover he sought by all the arts known to craftiness to harass the younger boy, whose patience this test tried ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... officer, his yellow canines showing like tusks. His matted face was an unlovely sight. In it stark, naked fear struggled with craftiness and cruelty. ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... strongly tempted to narrate a few remarkable instances of the animal's cunning, but we forbear for want of space. Our reader must take it for granted that when he attempts to trap a fox, he will be likely to find more than his match in the superior craftiness of that animal. If the trap is overturned and the bait gone, or if repeatedly sprung and found empty, he must not be surprised or discouraged, for he is experiencing only what all other trappers have experienced before him. There are instances on record where this ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... am tired of your beauty, that I know your voice and your gestures by heart, and that neither your whims nor your stupidity nor your craftiness can any longer entertain me. Can you tell me then why ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... indignant, suffocated by wrath, by confusion, and all the more cast down because, with his Norman cunning, he was quite capable of doing the thing with which he was charged, and even of boasting of it as a shrewd trick. He had a confused idea that his innocence was impossible to establish, his craftiness being so well known. And he was cut to the heart by the ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... with suppressed rage. He was now convinced that the suavity of his colleague concealed a craftiness he had never suspected, and he felt sure that Everett had taken advantage of his absence to strike an underhanded blow. Banishing a desire to fell the other to the floor and then choke the secret from him, he decided to ply all the craft of his ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... the exultation of the woman when she saw the triumph of her new friends over her own people. She was proud of this result of her craftiness and her skill. When, the engagement over, she scanned the field, looking at the dead and searching for Tyope among them in vain, her disappointment was fearful. Corpse after corpse she scrutinized, turning over the ghastly bodies, peering into the lifeless ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... working out the harvest of retribution, through that law of heredity that makes sons repeat the qualities of their father. When Jacob was now advanced in years his ten sons began, to develop craftiness, and soon they plowed great furrows of care in the father's face. In those days of care his young son Joseph stole into Jacob's heart like a sweet sunbeam, and, with his open, loving ways, filled his ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... he coveted. Against his father's will, Louis married Charlotte of Savoy, daughter of his strongest neighbour in Dauphiny; suspicion and bad feeling grew strong between father and son; Louis was specially afraid of his father's counsellors; the King was specially afraid of his son's craftiness and ambition. It came to an open rupture, and Louis, in 1456, fled to the Court of Duke Philip of Burgundy. There he lived at refuge at Geneppe, meddling a good deal in Burgundian politics, and already opposing himself to ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... presented themselves to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely clerical, if it were possible, he seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness, as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh, that fellow—he's a parson." What we want them to say is, "He's a good fellow"—in ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... thy infernal craftiness. If I were to command thee to put him to a fair trial, thou wouldst confuse the senses of the just man, so that he would commit acts ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Instantly he felt a sharp twitch at his ankles and fell headlong. For a moment he lay dazed, utterly at a loss to understand, thrashing about frantically in futile effort to regain his feet. Then he became calm again, and brought craftiness instead of brute force to bear upon the trouble. He regained his feet. Then he studied the cause of the disaster, and finally stepped out again, cautiously now, having learned his lesson. So he did not stumble. But he did feel the check around his ankles again. ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... satisfy himself with respect to certain conjectures which had flitted through his brain whilst listening to the astonishing narrative of Lualamba. M'Bongwele was an ignorant savage, it is true, but he was possessed of a dauntless courage, a persistency of purpose, and an unscrupulous craftiness and ambitiousness of character which would have won him distinction of a certain unenviable kind in any community. Already his brain was teeming with vague unformed plots of the wildest and most audaciously ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... meditated already withdrawing her interests from the common fund. Incapable of observing the difference that a Creole nature placed between his mother-in-law and other women, Paul was far from suspecting her craftiness. The Creole nature is apart from all others; it derives from Europe by its intellect, from the tropics by the illogical violence of its passions, from the East by the apathetic indifference with which it does, or suffers, either good or evil, equally,—a ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... she not so far discovered a certain craftiness in the character of the Two Diamond stray-man that ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the war he had found himself physically unable to stand up before the enemy during a battle. When the report of guns was heard and the other men of his company got grimly into line and went forward, something happened to his legs and he wanted to run away. So great was the desire in him that craftiness grew in his brain. Watching his chance, he pretended to have been shot and fell to the ground, and when the others had gone on crept away and hid himself. He found it was not impossible to disappear altogether and reappear in another place. The draft went into ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... For all his craftiness, "he had not reigned four years when all the world was against him," says Duruy. "The people forced to provide, by paying a great many imposts, for the necessities of the government which they did not as yet comprehend, the bourgeoisie ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... Rydal, and he had the craftiness to realize that his knowledge was of value. Next day everyone in Mangadone knew that the hue and cry was out after the absconded clerk. He had betrayed his trust, cheated and defrauded his employers, and left his wife to die alone, for she died that night, and I was with her. That was the story ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... dominant characteristic of this fine race is cunning. And hence I think it would have been through their craftiness, chiefly, that they would have felt the impulse to study, and the wish to advance. Craft is a cat's delight: craft they never can have too much of. So it would have been from one triumph of cunning to another that they would have marched. That would have been ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... atmosphere of subtlety and slyness about the man that forced itself upon me, young as I was; and the way he kept eyeing me as we talked made me feel that I had to do with one that would be hard to circumvent if it came to a matter of craftiness. And at last, after a lot of thinking, as I walked about in the dusk, it struck me that Crone might be for taking a hand in the game of which I had heard, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... of the affair to the bishop, the bishop to Ragnvald, and Ragnvald to the "good men" or lendirmen of Orkney, who express themselves satisfied, and Ragnvald builds the Cathedral he had vowed to St. Magnus in Kirkwall—a strange medley of craftiness, murder, ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... their compatriots. Greeks, too—small, lithe, dark men, with keen faces and dark eyes, differing wonderfully from the calm, dignified, handsome Turks, but handsome in their way if it had not been for a peculiarly sharp, shifty expression that suggested craftiness and a desire to ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... of artillery. It is true that no immediate overt act of hostility had for some time been perpetrated by the Indians, who were assembled in force around the former garrison; but the experienced officer to whom the command had been intrusted was too sensible of the craftiness of the surrounding hordes to be deceived, by any outward semblance of amity, into neglect of those measures of precaution which were so indispensable to the surety ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... up to the straggling yellow hairs on his upper lip once more, and he smiled again, this time with a curious undercurrent of foolish craftiness. 'That's a good one,' he answered. 'Georgey told me you were original. Marmy's a millionaire, and many people love millionaires for their money. But to love Marmy for himself— I do call that originality! Why, weight for age, he's acknowledged ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Mr. Joseph, taking of his tea with Miss Iris," replied Mr. James, not at all offended by the allusion to his craftiness. Who should resemble the fox if not the second-hand bookseller? In no trade, perhaps, can the truly admirable qualities of that animal—his patience, his subtlety and craft, his pertinacity, his sagacity—be illustrated more to advantage. Mr. James felt a glow of virtue—would ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant |
