"Factitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while ritually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society. Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... that urge the old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call outworn factitious ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just as savages are by no means simple. The fine side of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole dramatic development of monarchical France was to spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed round by a conventional civilization, and, strive as he may, no man wears ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grim. And she sighed. But the sigh was an affectation, meant partly to convince herself that she was grown- up, and partly to keep her in countenance in the intimidating bed. This melancholy was factitious, was less than transient foam on the deep sea of her joy. Death and sorrow and sin were dim shapes to her; the ruthless egoism of happiness blew them away with a puff, and their wistful faces vanished. To see her there in the bed, framed in mahogany and tassels, lying on her side, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... as well as to those who bore them, contemptuous of etiquette, and incapable of putting constraint upon his nature, he remained an "outsider," and refused to comply with a host of factitious or worldly obligations which he regarded as useless or disgusting. Thus even at Ajaccio he managed to escape the customary ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was the outward factitious but, again, the inward; there was a certain prescribed mode of feeling and of thinking, of living and of dying. It was impossible to address a man without placing oneself at his orders, or a woman ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... country; and they can scarcely give it a worse one than an English cabinet minister, who is thinking of English, not Indian politics; who does not remains long enough in office to acquire an intelligent interest in so complicated a subject; upon whom the factitious public opinion got up in Parliament, consisting of two or three fluent speakers, acts with as much force as if it were genuine; while he is under none of the influences of training and position which would ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... Virgilian; and the brass, in which he himself lived. "A poet in our time," he said, "is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can, therefore, serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth." In another part of this essay he says: "While the historian and the philosopher are advancing ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... enormity of delight in exhibitions of human nature, would have mostly cultivated that class of society in which the feelings are more elementary and simple, in which the thoughts speak a plainer language, and in which the restraints of factitious or conventional decorum are exchanged for the restraints of mere sexual decency. It is a noticeable fact to all who have looked upon human life with an eye of strict attention, that the abstract image of womanhood, in. its loveliness, its delicacy, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... poetry is robbed of one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors, appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the state or country, or was very rich, and has kept the fortune in the family; and thirdly, a swarm of youths who can dance dexterously, and who are invited for that purpose. Now these are all arbitrary and factitious distinctions upon which to found so profound a social difference as that which exists in American, or, at least, in New York society. First, as a general rule, the rich men of every community who make their own money are not the most generally intelligent and cultivated. They have a shrewd ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... tenderly invited to "fly from the world" with the poet), and I used to think that he was like an embodiment of Moore's lyrical genius: there was so much pathos and wit and humor and grace and spirit and tenderness, and such a quantity of factitious flummery besides in him, that he always reminded me of those pretty and provoking songs in which some affected attitudinizing conceit mingles with almost every expression of genuine feeling, like an artificial rose in a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... really has to say. His doctrine so far coincides with that of Diderot and other revolutionists, though he has no sympathy with their social aspirations. His utterances, however, remind us too much—in substance, though not in form—of the rhetoric of debating societies. They are as factitious as the old-fashioned appeals to the memory of Brutus. They would doubtless make a sensation at the Union. Diogenes tells us that 'all nations, all cities, all communities, should combine in one great hunt, like that of the Scythians at the approach of winter, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... adores the hand of God in all natural objects! The doctrine, it is to be observed, which is expanded through many pages of the book on Original Sin, is not merely that men are legally guilty, as being devoid of 'true virtue,' though possessed of a certain factitious moral sense, but that they are actually for the most part detestably wicked. One illustration of his method may be sufficient. The vileness of man is proved by the remark (not peculiar to Edwards), that men who used to live 1,000 years now live only 70; whilst throughout Christendom ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... rhyme and acrostic. Sometimes they accomplished veritable feats of mental gymnastics, whose merit resided in the mere fact that a difficulty was overcome. Too often a play upon words or alliteration takes the place of inspiration, and ideas give way to factitious combinations. ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... Carlyle. With each of them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by external observation and history. In connection with each of them has been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimentalism, when circumstances draw away the mask. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... of redundant but gorgeously florid adjectives, what time he peeled factitious whiskers from his face and shook their stickiness from his fingers. His Irish friend, with brilliant but less elaborate comments, struggled to depilate a Kaiser-like moustache ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... Geographical habits Get away and find a place where he could despise himself Gossips were soon at work Grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless Grief that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry Haughty humility Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry Imagination to help his memory Invariably advised to settle—no matter how, but settle Invariably allowed a half for shrinkage in his statements Is this your first visit? It had cost something to upholster these women Large amount ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... to have kept hot a grudge against the theatre: and he relieves his feelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his novels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is factitious and self-overvaluing in the Provencal type, he understood and he found it easy to pardon; but what was factitious and self-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and he refused to pardon. And here he shows in strong ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Miss Anastasia's hero had entirely monopolised the stage. It was twenty minutes past five when Miss Joliffe, senior, returned from the Dorcas meeting; "precisely twenty minutes past five," as she remarked many times subsequently, with that factitious importance which the ordinary mind attaches to the exact ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... never displays itself in an isolated manner. Whoever wishes to become their tyrant therefore does well to allow no kind of manifestation to public opinion; Bonaparte joins to this idea, which is common to all despots, an artifice peculiar to the present time, to wit, the art of proclaiming some factitious opinion in journals which have the appearance of being free, they make so many phrases in the sense which they are ordered. It must be confessed that our French writers are the only ones who can in this manner every morning embellish the same sophism, and who hug themselves in the ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... a little in the miscellany called (not without a touch of piquancy) La Tyrannie des Fees Detruite, by a Mme. d'Auneuil, whom persons of a sceptical turn might imagine to be a sort of factitious rival to Mme. d'Aulnoy.[231] It returns to the Greek or pseudo-Greek names of the heroic romance, and to its questionable device of histoires stuck like plums in a pudding. Nor are the Sans Parangon and the Fee des Fees ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... clock; it is electrical, and goes with a regularity that defies the best chronometers. I have divided it into twenty-four hours, like the Italian clocks, because for me there is neither night nor day, sun nor moon, but only that factitious light that I take with me to the bottom of the sea. Look! just now, it is ten o'clock in ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... feelings of joy or sorrow are very largely a matter of temperament, and still more largely a matter of responding to the facts round about me. And I cannot pump up emotions to order; and if I could they would be factitious, artificial, insincere, and do me more harm than good.' Perfectly true. There are a great many ugly names for manufactured emotions, and none of them a bit too ugly. Peter does not wish you to try to get up feeling to order. It is the bane of some type of Christianity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... for it—jokes a la portee of Effie and Tishy and mainly about them. These two joined in the merriment, as if they followed perfectly, as indeed they might, and gave a small sigh afterward, with a little factitious air. Dora remained grave, almost sad; it was when she was different, in this way, that he felt how much he liked her. He hated, in general, a large ring of people who had drawn up chairs in the public room of an hotel: some one ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which her own ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will further illustrate Spinoza's ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield. She stared at the fact on the journey back to Versailles, and all that sleepless night in her room; and the next morning, when the housemaid came in with her breakfast tray, she felt the factitious energy that comes from having decided, however half-heartedly, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... calumniated; with all my heart, said I, but there are so many liars, that I find it safer to believe them. He said, in justice to himself, he must explain: God forbid I should interfere with you, said I, with the same factitious grin, but it can change nothing. So I kept my temper, rid myself of an unfaithful servant, found a method of conducting similar interviews in the future, and fell in my own liking. One thing more: I learned a fresh tolerance for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... worshippers. In the New Testament they are never designated priests, [644:1] neither is their intervention between God and the sinner described as indispensable. But Catholicism invested them with a factitious consequence, representing them as inheriting peculiar rights and privileges by ecclesiastical descent from the apostles. According to Cyprian, "Christ says to the apostles, and thereby to all prelates who by vicarious ordination ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the hands of Mr. Cannon. The next book, a thin one, had toppled over sideways and was bridging the vacancy at an angle; several other similar thin books filled up the remainder of the shelf. She stared, with the factitious interest of one who is very nervously awaiting an encounter, at the titles, and presently deciphered the words, 'Victor Hugo,' on each of the thin volumes. Her interest instantly became real. Characteristically abrupt ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... poem. This want of unity is essentially detrimental to the general impression of the work, and the author has succeeded in throwing around its individual parts an interest which does not attach to it as a whole. The world to which the poet transports his readers is truly poetic; all the factitious wants of common life, its cold calculations and its imaginary distinctions, disappear; love and honor reign supreme, and the prompting of the one and the laws of the other are alone permitted to stimulate and regulate a life, of which war is the only business and gallantry the only ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... in others a factitious state, An opium dream[238] of too much youth and reading, But was in them their nature or their fate: No novels e'er had set their young hearts bleeding,[dm] For Haidee's knowledge was by no means great, And Juan was a boy of saintly ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone—substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may beguile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repugnance which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Darnford was still more earnest to obtain an interview. Accustomed to submit to every impulse of passion, and never taught, like women, to restrain the most natural, and acquire, instead of the bewitching frankness of nature, a factitious propriety of behaviour, every desire became a torrent that ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... not fallen to the lot of civilized men. I was wrong no doubt: it is just that those should be most favored by their common mother, who are least disposed to pervert her gifts, or to give the preference to advantages which are factitious, and often very frivolous. We quitted with regret this charming spot, and soon came to another large village, which our guide informed us was called Kathlapootle, and was situated at the confluence of a small stream, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... some that the Haggadah contains no popular legends, that it is wholly a factitious, academic product. A cursory glance at the pseudepigraphic literature of the Jews, which is older than the Haggadah literature by several centuries, shows how untenable this view is. That the one literature should have drawn from the other is precluded ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... active exercise which, as every child shows us, nature strongly prompts, but from a persistent disregard of nature's promptings; but the natural spontaneous exercise having been forbidden, and the bad consequences of no exercise having become conspicuous, there has been adopted a system of factitious exercise—gymnastics. That this is better than nothing we admit; but that it is an adequate substitute for play we deny. The truth is that happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accelerating the circulation ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... every man, and especially every mechanic, who has any ambition or conscience beyond the exigencies of bread and butter. Lack of ambition is not an American fault, but it is too often an ambition that regards irrelevant and factitious honors rather than those to which it may legitimately and laudably aspire. A mechanic should find in the excellence of his mechanism a greater reward and satisfaction than in the wearing of a badge of office which any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... followed the example of their General-in-Chief, and before the end of the month the armed enemies of the Union had practically ceased to exist. The fame of General Grant was full. He had entered the service with no factitious advantage, and his promotion, from the first to the last, had been based on merit alone,—without the aid of political influence, without the interposition of personal friends. Criticism of military skill is but idle chatter in the face ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... only accept the almanac and the rules of arithmetic. The interminable years of her marriage rolled back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and trustful, convinced that her versatile husband was unique among his sex. The fading of a short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of the unique male to the ordinary level of males, the births of her three girls and their rearing and training: all these things seemed as trifles to her, mere excrescences and depressions in the vast tableland ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the plunder of the Church that we must seek for the primary cause of our political exclusion, and our commercial restraint. That unhallowed booty created a factitious aristocracy, ever fearful that they might be called upon to regorge their sacrilegious spoil. To prevent this they took refuge in political religionism, and paltering with the disturbed consciences, or the pious fantasies, of a portion of the people, they organised them ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and, when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... no parallel since the first years of George III. Between February, 1852, and February, 1855, the country had no fewer than four different Prime-ministers, a fact which was at once both the proof and the parent of weakness in every administration. Lord John Russell had attempted to procure a factitious support in the country by stimulating a fresh demand for parliamentary reform. A year or two before, he had provoked the dissatisfaction of the "Advanced Liberals," as they called themselves, by insisting on the finality of the Reform Bill of 1832, and by advising his followers ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... the pretensions of the Duc d'Epernon, even had she felt it expedient to do so; the unlimited confidence which she had reposed in him since the death of her royal consort having invested him with a factitious importance, by which he was enabled to secure a strong party in his favour upon every question in which he was personally interested. She had assigned to his use a suite of apartments in the Louvre, declaring that his continual presence and advice were essential to her; and, in addition ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... through with Christian sentiment, they are rebels against it. The rejection of one worship for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of that other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloister taking a new direction, and winning so a later space ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... and sister, pleased with Pierrette's astonishment at the house and anxious to enjoy it, took her to the salon to show her its splendors and teach her not to touch them. Many celibates, driven by loneliness and the moral necessity of caring for something, substitute factitious affections for natural ones; they love dogs, cats, canaries, servants, or their confessor. Rogron and Sylvie had come to the pass of loving immoderately their house and furniture, which had cost them so dear. Sylvie began by helping Adele in the ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... improved, are almost daily exchanging owners, and a considerable spirit of enterprise has been awakened within a year or two past. The prices of farms and improvements vary greatly, and are influenced much by factitious and local circumstances. From St. Clair county northward, they average probably from five to ten dollars per acre, and are rising in value. In some counties, farms will cost from 2 to 5 dollars per acre. A farm in Illinois, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... poetry has been so popular. How happens it that so many who have looked upon Nature herself with great indifference, have been so much delighted with the reflection of her image in the pages of the poets? We suspect, indeed, that a part of the popularity of this class of writers is factitious. THOMSON, the most popular, is we suspect oftener purchased than read; and his 'Seasons' are not unfrequently spoken of with admiration by those who know little of them but the episodes. The chief interest of the 'Task' is to be sought ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... land-tax, and shall go to the public treasury." For, considering her territory as a private estate and her subjects as serfs, she appropriated the whole produce of their labour, with the exception of what sufficed to keep body and soul together. It was by these means . . . that a factitious state of prosperity was induced and maintained, which, though it might, and I believe did, deceive the Begam's neighbours into an impression that her country was highly prosperous, could not delude the population into content and happiness. Above the surface and to the eye all was smiling and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the exchange of the money against the deed duly signed and witnessed. M. le Marquis had always been the intermediary for her letters, you understand, and for the small sums of money which she had sent from time to time to the factitious M. de Naquet; now he was to be entrusted with the final negotiations which, though at a heavy cost, would bring security and happiness once more in the sumptuous palace of the Rue ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Imperf. reduplicate with ι the initial consonant, (prefixing simply ί if that cannot be done, and sometimes adopting other modes of strengthening,) and in the act. they lengthen the root in the Indic., α or ε into η, ο into ω. The 2d Aor. (those in υμι being factitious have not this tense) has in the act. a long vowel or diphthong throughout, except the Imperative ε or ...
— Greek in a Nutshell • James Strong
... Science still rages, in spite of the declaration of Professor Huxley that in his opinion the conflict between the two is entirely factitious. But theologians are wiser now than they were in the days of Galileo; they are waiting to see what the scientists can prove, and then, when the various hypotheses are shown to be true, it will be time enough to reconcile the verities ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... overwrought imagination there was something ominous in the change. He had counted on the goad of opposition to fight off the fatal languor which he had learned to expect at such crises. Now that he found there was to be no struggle he understood how largely his zeal had of late depended on such factitious incentives. He felt an irrational longing to throw himself on the other side of the conflict, to tear in bits the paper awaiting his signature, and disown the policy which had dictated it. But the tide of acquiescence on ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Resolve thus lost his control over the wild team of fancy! Was this languor of the Will a signal of coming peril, the peril of slumber? So strangely vivid those fancies were, so brightly definite, as about to take visible form, to move with factitious life, to play some unholy drama upon the stage of dreams! "O Thou Fully Awakened!" he cried aloud, "help now thy humble disciple to obtain the blessed wakefulness of perfect contemplation! let him find force to fulfil his vow! suffer not Mara to prevail ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... principle, and virtue itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law. No shade of sin or vanity has yet stolen over that bright innocence. No discord within has marred the loveliness without—no strife of the factitious world without has disturbed the harmony within. The comprehension of evil appears forever shut out, as if goodness had converted all things to itself; and all to the pure in heart must necessarily be pure. The impression produced is exactly that of the character of Desdemona; ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they had. If signs of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, factitious, temporary—soon, as the event proved, to droop into the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged they were to be wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for the mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general; and ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... much more judicious would your vote be at the next election? "But these are facts—interesting facts," you say. Without doubt they are facts (such, at least, as are not wholly or partially fictions); and to many they may be interesting facts. But this by no means implies that they are valuable. Factitious or morbid opinion often gives seeming value to things that have scarcely any. A tulipomaniac will not part with a choice bulb for its weight in gold. To another man an ugly piece of cracked old china seems his most desirable possession. And there ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait; ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... St. Mark, could yet cover the lofty pretension with the ridicule it merited. Time has since taught the world that Venice continued this idle deception for ages after both reason and modesty should have dictated its discontinuance; but, at the period of which we write, that ambitious, crapulous, and factitious state was rather beginning to feel the symptomatic evidence of its fading circumstances, than to be fully conscious of the swift progress of a downward course. In this manner do communities, like individuals, draw near their dissolution, inattentive to the symptoms of decay, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the emperor, who was not so easily deceived, he had but a few moments of factitious joy. He soon complained "that an annoying warfare of partisans[158] hovered around him; that, notwithstanding all these pacific demonstrations, bodies of Cossacks were prowling on his flanks and in his rear. Had ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... which awake in us a whole world of painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of disenchantment, from which it takes a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Majesty. On the whole, he was not desirous of prolonging his own residence, although, to do him justice, he was not influenced by fear. He thought or affected to think that the situation was one of a factitious popular discontent, procured by the intrigues of a few ambitious and impoverished Catilines and Cethegi, not a rising rebellion such as the world had never seen, born of the slowly-awakened wrath of, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his breast inspire, And, like a master, wak'd the[59] soothing lyre: Horatian strains a grateful heart proclaim, While Sky's wild rocks resound his Thralia's name.— Hesperia's plant, in some less skillful hands, To bloom a while, factitious heat demands; Though glowing Maro a faint warmth supplies, The sickly blossom in the hot-house dies: By Johnson's genial culture, art, and toil, Its root strikes deep, and owns the fost'ring soil; Imbibes our sun through all its swelling veins, And grows a ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... "shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funerals?" Material wealth gives a factitious superiority to the living, but the treasures of intellect give a real superiority to the dead; and the rich man, who would not deign to walk the street with the starving and penniless man of genius, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... material perception of another, without aid from material elements. From time to time I have known, beyond the possibility of deception, that the kindred spirit was still my companion, my own inalienable possession, in spite of all factitious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... took home some pieces, and on my return examined them more attentively; found them to be very clear, transparent, and friable; when calcined, they turned extremely white, and with them I made some factitious marble. This gave me hopes that this country, producing Plaster of Paris, might, besides, have stones ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... the reception of the book had been up to this time, and of the popularity Dickens had won as its author, this also will be the proper place to speak. For its kind, its extent, and the absence of everything unreal or factitious in the causes that contributed to it, it is unexampled in literature. Here was a series of sketches, without the pretense to such interest as attends a well-constructed story; put forth in a form apparently ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and of the many factitious wants that accompany a luxurious civilization, a very large and increasing proportion of women are left to make their way in life without any male protector, and the difficulties they have to encounter through physical weakness have been most unnaturally and most ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... has almost written a psychology, what with his Treatise on the Passions and his letters and, besides, certain passages in his Meditations. The soul thinks and has passions. There are three kinds of ideas, the factitious, the adventitious, and the innate; the factitious ideas are those which the imagination forms; the adventitious ideas are those suggested by the external world through the intermediary of the senses; the innate ideas are those constituting the mind itself, the conditions under which ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... art. Intellectual and an artist, less artist for being intellectual, responding to the despairing mood of those around him, it became clear to him that political agitation had failed and must fail because it has a vision of government and no vision of human life. Society is factitious. The intellectual asks why. The artist never asks these absurd questions. Art is free. If he can attain art that is enough for him. Life, whether or no it be the slow process of evolution it is generally ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... mind, owing to a want of the proper exercise of its powers, are, apathy, discontent, a restless longing for excitement, a craving for unattainable good, a diseased and morbid action of the imagination, dissatisfaction with the world, and factitious interest in trifles which the mind feels to be unworthy of its powers. Such minds sometimes seek alleviation in exciting amusements; others resort to the grosser enjoyments of sense. Oppressed with the extremes of languor, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... during these three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be and do unfitted her for the factitious ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... There is nothing so consoling to the depressed man as the unmitigated misery of a walk through the London rain. One is not mocked by any factitious gaiety. The mind is in harmony with the sodden universe. It is well to have everything in the world wrong at one and the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... in any true sense of the word? This seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal about it; try it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy criterion, and there is scarcely the color of money in it. The delegates ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... purposes, and that makes you yearn, as your forehead mantles with fresh blood, for a kindred spirit and a kindred strength. Above all you love—though you do not know it now—the BREADTH of a country life. In the fields of God's planting there is ROOM. No walls of brick and mortar cramp one; no factitious distinctions mould your habit. The involuntary reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural. The flowers, the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent. The boy grows into ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... would-be eloquent lawyer mispronounced a foreign word, saying, for instance, "factitious" instead of "fictitious," Pyotr Dmitritch brightened up at once and asked, "What? How? Factitious? What does that mean?" and then observed impressively: "Don't make use of words you do not understand." And the lawyer, finishing his speech, would ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that he would paint Charmian in her own studio, with the accessories of her peculiar pose in life about her; they were factitious, but they were genuine expressions of her character; he could not realize her so ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... custom of the rural districts among honourable young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what he had said, and take the consequences. For his own soothing he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Beauchamp. But this sudden and factitious joy soon forsook the young man, and was succeeded by a still ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... part on their side, but rather against the influences that do violence to love: on the one hand, the reckless and thoughtless yielding to mere momentary desire, and, on the other hand, the still more fatal influences of wealth and position and worldly convenience which give a factitious value to persons who would never appear attractive partners in life were love and eugenic ideals left to go hand in hand. It is such unions, and not those inspired by the wholesome instincts of wholesome lovers, which lead, if not to the abstract "deterioration of the race," at all events in ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... B's. I might devote my ardent youth to Bar-Room Glassware and Bottlers' Supplies. On the other hand, I might not. Similarly, while there is no doubt a bright future for somebody in Celluloid, Fiberloid, and Other Factitious Goods, instinct tells me that there is none for—" he pulled up on the verge of saying, "James Braithwaite Crocker," and shuddered at the nearness of the pitfall. "—for—" he hesitated ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... brittle, factitious body, produced by fusing sand with an alkali. The essential ingredients of glass are silex and potash, or soda; a few other substances are sometimes added. Silex is found nearly pure in rock crystal, flint, and other varieties of quartz; for the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... manful spirit, considering how the task of holding together a Ministry had been imposed on him and the temptation which it afforded for the attacks of irresponsible enemies, that he would not resign office on any side issue or question of purely factitious importance, and that he would hold his place unless defeated by a vote of want of confidence or a vote of censure. He challenged the leader of the Opposition to test the feeling of the House by a division ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... delusory; illusive, illusory; elusive, insidious, ad captandum vulgus[Lat]. untrue &c 546; mock, sham, make-believe, counterfeit, snide*, pseudo, spurious, supposititious, so-called, pretended, feigned, trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious;bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the Boyne, which from its peculiar religious colouring has obtained a somewhat factitious celebrity, may be taken as the date at which the English crown was firmly fixed on William's head. Yet it would be more accurate to say that the success of William, and with it the success of Europe, against ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... sincere because they were not in the least frank with each other. She let Dan beat about the bush to his heart's content, and waited for him at the point which she knew he was coming to, with an unconsciousness which he knew was factitious; neither of them got tired of this, or failed freshly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Europe. The virtue of hospitality, exiled by luxury and refinement, exhibits itself in the New World under such noble and endearing forms as would almost tempt the philosopher, as well as the weary traveller, to dread the approach of the factitious civilization ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... for society which is symptomatic of her age. The wound that pierced her young heart two years ago had not healed so completely that she could find pleasure in inane conversation across a primeval forest of sixpenny ferns, and the factitious liveliness of ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... poetical view of Nature; and that is what the poet, in proportion to his want of dramatic faculty, must draw from himself. He must—he does in these days—colour Nature with the records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life and interest on her by making her reflect his own joy or sorrow. If he be out of humour, she must frown; if he sigh, she must roar; if he be—what he very seldom is—tolerably comfortable, the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... was tall, and her features led people to say, "That must have been a handsome woman!" She coated her cheeks so thickly with rouge that the wrinkles were scarcely visible; but her eyes, far from gaining a factitious brilliancy from this strong carmine, looked all the more dim. She wore a vast quantity of diamonds, and dressed with sufficient taste not to make herself ridiculous. Her sharp nose promised epigram. A well-fitted set of teeth preserved a smile of such ...
— Domestic Peace • Honore de Balzac
... positions are so openly arranged for effect, that the nearest approach is only conjecture, as the nearest approach to reality is only illusion. Courts and campaigns are not human life. Kings and ministers, in their court pageantry, are scarcely more entitled to the name of human beings. They are factitious forms, showy spectacles, glittering effigies. But strip off the state costume; stand beside them while they are unconscious of a spectator; enter into their minds; seize their motives; measure their impulses: it is only then that we discover their affinity to the family ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... false, as a preservative against contagion; but in the confined dwellings of the poor they are positively mischievous, because they cannot be used without shutting out the wholesome atmospheric air, and substituting for it a factitious gas, which for aught we know, or can know of the nature of the contagious vapour, whether acid, alkaline, or anything else, may actually be adding to its deleterious principle instead of neutralising it: but in thus striking ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... personal. Instead of telling people what they think that they are thinking, he tells them what they have always known but think they have forgotten. He performs, for this oblivious generation, the service of a great reminder. He lures us from the strident and factitious world of which we read daily in the first pages of the newspapers, back to the serene eternal world of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. He educates the many, not by any crass endeavor to formulate or even to mold ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... express a genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigour, and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that can be said of them is that their inspiration was factitious, and that their motives had been handled better in the age of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... half-sweet pang that strikes a boy's heart in the presence of the dear first girl is any less strong, intoxicating, and real to him than that which prompts him to take the full-grown woman to wife? With factitious sincerity we quote, "The boy is father to the man," and then refuse to believe that the qualities, emotions, and passions of the man are inherited from this same boy,—are just the growth, the development, of what was ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... "The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine. It fell, little by little, under her quiet gaze, a gaze in which there was neither contempt nor irony nor wounded pride, but only a tender wistfulness of interrogation; ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... facetious, factitious, fallacious, fallible, fastidious, fatuous, feasible, feculence, fecundity, felicitous, felonious, fetid, feudal, fiducial, filament, filtrate, finesse, flaccid, flagitious, floriculture, florid, fluctuate, foible, forfeiture, fortuitous, fractious, franchise, frangible, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in him—factitious no doubt—to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... of industry and the accomplishment of great works. But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... world, she thought might be reasonably justified in distrusting. In one respect, she even fancied Mrs. Bloomfield's knowledge and cleverness superior to those which she had so often admired in her own sex abroad. It was untrammelled, equally by the prejudices incident to a factitious condition of society, or by their reaction; two circumstances that often obscured the sense and candour of those to whom she had so often listened with pleasure in other countries. The singularly feminine ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... have borne that down. There was something it could not bear down. Palmer was a doubter, an infidel. What this meant to the girl, we cannot tell; her religion was not ours. People build their faith on Christ, as a rock,—a factitious aid. She found Him in her life, long ago, when she was a child, and her soul grew out from Him. He was a living Jesus to her, not a dead one. That was why she had a healthy soul. Pain was keener to her than to us; the filth, injustice, bafflings in the world,—they hurt her; she never glossed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... it seems paradoxical to define modesty as an aspiration towards truth in love; it seems, on the contrary, to be an altogether factitious feeling. But to simplify the problem, we have to suppose modesty reduced to its normal functions, disengaged from its superstitions, its variegated customs and prejudices, the true modesty of simple and healthy natures, as far removed from prudery as from immodesty. And what ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and the temper is hushed to a transient calm by expedients, which in time must lose their effect, and which can have no power over confirmed fretfulness. The pleasure of exercising their senses, is in itself sufficient to children without any factitious stimulus, which only exhausts their excitability, and renders them incapable of being amused by a variety of common objects, which would naturally be their entertainment. We do not here speak of the attempts made to sooth a child who is ill; "to charm the sense of pain," so far as it can be ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... This book has passages of masterly description, and is as fresh as a landscape from another world; but it seems to me that it has always had a reputation partly factitious. It is the poorest of the Leather Stocking tales, nor was its success either marked or spontaneous. Still, it was very well received, though it was thought to be a proof that the author was written out. With ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... all one must have seen far under the surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... his lips, his factitious spirits deserted him. He left his seat, impenetrably deaf to all Allan's efforts at rallying him on his extraordinary answer, and resumed his restless pacing of the deck in dead silence. Once more the haunting thought ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the gaps in this treillage; and parasites—not timid parasites like ivy or like moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees— dominate the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage, and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You do not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the eternal monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite variety;—species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... critics; his works are widely introduced to the public; and if they are really good his reputation is secure. In Wordsworth's case the detractors had been unusually persistent, and the reaction, when it came, was therefore unusually violent; it was even somewhat factitious in its extent; and the poems were forced by enthusiasts upon a public which was only half ripe for them. After the poet's death a temporary counter-reaction succeeded, and his fame is only now finding ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... it to assume the proportions and the dignity of revolution, in other words, of a rebellion too powerful to be crushed. The secret friends of the Secession treason in the Free States have done their best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about the right of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of the Law of Nations. There is a right, and sometimes a duty, of rebellion, as there is also a right and sometimes a duty of hanging men ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... harmonized by orange, which is the colour produced by compounding it with the yellow, next to it on the other side of the spectrum." In treating "of the effect" of a picture, although the author with a kind of reluctance admits, or "will not condemn absolutely" factitious effects, he has no predilection for them, and blames for the extravagant use of them Carravagio and others of the Italian schools. Unquestionably they afford a power which should be used with judgment, then most applicable when the supernatural ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... his first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of factitious savage panoply. It was called "The Last of the Hurons," and the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling him "The Next to the ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow, and his consolations their colour, when suffering has wasted away those upper strata of his factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower, simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the existence, then there is a hope of his commencing ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... conscious of it, was not at all sorry to please those whom she graciously called her friends. I confess that this seductive Lawton appeared to me a chef-d'oeuvre of Nature, and in recalling her image I am tempted to write a book against the finery, the factitious graces and the coquetry of many ladies whom the world admires." Segur says: "She was a nymph rather than a woman, and had the most graceful figure and beautiful form possible. Her eyes appeared to reflect as in a mirror the meekness and purity of her mind and the goodness of her heart." Polly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... violated, and the evils, which hitherto adhered to an advanced state of civilization, were doubled. The student left his books, the artist his study: the occupations of life were gone, but the amusements remained; enjoyment might be protracted to the verge of the grave. All factitious colouring disappeared—death rose like night, and, protected by its murky shadows the blush of modesty, the reserve of pride, the decorum of prudery were frequently thrown aside as useless veils. This was not universal. Among better natures, anguish and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... which reason feels, to form some presupposition that shall serve the understanding as a proper basis for the complete determination of its conceptions, the idealistic and factitious nature of such a presupposition is too evident to allow reason for a moment to persuade itself into a belief of the objective existence of a mere creation of its own thought. But there are other considerations ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the latter days Her whom west winds with natal foam bedewed, Wafted toward Cyprus, lily-breasted, nude, Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face. And, sick with all those centuries of tears Shed in the penance for factitious woe, Once more I saw the nations at her feet, For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo! The breast your lips abjured is still ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... of the arrival of Lady Lillycraft at the Hall, I ought to have mentioned the entertainment which I derived from witnessing the unpacking of her carriage, and the disposing of her retinue. There is something extremely amusing to me in the number of factitious wants, the loads of imaginary conveniences, but real encumbrances, with which the luxurious are apt to burthen themselves. I like to watch the whimsical stir and display about one of these petty progresses. The number of robustious footmen and retainers of all ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... privilege, and work a disgrace, is among the deadliest errors. Without depth of thought, or earnestness of feeling, or strength of purpose, living an unreal life, sacrificing substance to show, substituting the factitious for the natural, mistaking a crowd for society, finding its chief pleasure in ridicule, and exhausting its ingenuity in expedients for killing time, fashion is among the last influences under which a human being, who respects himself or who comprehends the great end of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in this infernal impasse my spirits began to rise, to soar. I declare it: I led Flora forward to the set with a gaiety which may have been unnatural, but was certainly not factitious. A Scotsman would have called me fey. As the song goes—and it matters not if I had it then, or read it later in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a note of intimacy and of challenge in Lady Massulam's demeanour that pleased Mr. Prohack immensely, and caused him to see that the romance of Frinton was neither factitious nor at an end. He felt pleasantly, and even thrillingly, that they ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... had already swallowed one glass, and he turned in a rage. He was a tall and naturally powerful man—almost as strongly built as his son, with long arms like his, which were dangerous even yet in such a moment of factitious strength and real excitement. Robert could not lift his arm even to defend himself from his father, although, had he judged it necessary, I believe he would not, in the cause of his redemption, have ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... cause of the throne and of the altar. This epithet, "fascinating," in turn fascinated me; and I thought that my prose was, like some serpent, about to fascinate all the butcher-birds and ducks of the democratic marsh. A year passed away; these fine friendships cooled: 't is the fate of these factitious tendernesses. With winter my second volume appeared, and Monsieur Louis Ulbach set to work again; but this time he found me merely "ingenious." It was a good deal more than I merited, and I would willingly have contented ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... It was shrewdly suspected that these alarms were purposely propagated from headquarters to accustom the men to form themselves quickly at night without panic. In after times, in front of Richmond, we had such duty to perform, without any factitious reasons. It was a matter of necessary precaution to stand to our arms nightly for two or ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the characteristic of the present century, from which the succeeding will, I am persuaded, receive a great accumulation of knowledge; and doubtless its diffusion will in a great measure destroy the factitious national characters which have been supposed permanent, though only rendered so by the permanency ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... and Donizetti and Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement, but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... exchangeable value: in other cases it is less. Then the same phenomenon is produced, but in the opposite direction: the balance is in favor of the producer, while the consumer suffers. This is notably the case in seasons of scarcity, when the high price of provisions is always more or less factitious. There are also professions whose whole art consists in giving to an article of minor usefulness, which could easily be dispensed with, an exaggerated value of opinion: such, in general, are the arts of luxury. Man, through his aesthetic ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... for epigram he had a genuine gift—to the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious enthusiasm and the abuse of mythology and allegory. When Rousseau died, Lefranc de Pompignan mourned for "le premier chantre du monde," reborn as the Orpheus of France, in a poem which alone of Lefranc's numerous productions—and by virtue of two stanzas—has ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden |
