"Frivolity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... says there would often be twenty-five one dollar "Pony" stamps and the same number of Government stamps—a total in postage of twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents—on a single envelope. Not much frivolity passed through these mails. ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... Tassoni, the younger Buonarroti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature. The Bolognese Academy in painting. After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento—barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation—Jesuitry translated into culture. On one bright point, indeed, the eye rests with hope and comfort. Palestrina, when he died in 1594, did not close but opened an age for music. His posterity, those composers, lutists, violists and singers, from whom the modern ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... directors of corporations or financial magnates, the legal briefs and sermons underwent a similar change. Social amenities displaced Calvinistic theology; dancing, which had been a crime against the Church, became mere frivolity and finally an innocent pastime. Leading lawyers ceased to plead in petit courts to inferior magistrates, and learned to devise forms of contracts, to lobby in legislatures, or appear with the great Maryland and Virginia practitioners before the ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... acquisition of wealth. The historical classes have, therefore, selected purposes, and have invented ways of fulfilling them. Their ways have been imitated by the masses. The classes have led the way in luxury, frivolity, and vice, and also in refinement, culture, and the art of living. They have introduced variation. The masses are not large classes at the base of a social pyramid; they are the core of the society. They are conservative. They accept life ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... With unsurpassed frivolity and cruelty, 'tis said, That you, Mavourneen, wish to set your heel on Ulster's head. If you, who under Orange foot so long time have been trod, Would trample down your tyrants old, it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... prairie, poured forth her tale. She had at the last moment decided she could not bear to be married without a veil, and had gone early in the morning to the nearest town to invest her last money in that frivolity. Fate was against her, however, for there were no veils in the shops, and a persuasive milliner had induced her to give up her cherished notion and buy a hat instead. "And I'm most sure the ribbon's cotton-back," she sighed. "I don't ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... replacing them with something better. We do not make as much, or as good, use of our Sundays as we might do. There is a medium between the rigid Sabbatarianism of our ancestors and the absolute waste of the day of rest in mere pleasure and frivolity. All the world is deploring the secularizing of Sunday. Not only is churchgoing perfunctory or absent, but in all ranks of life there is a disposition to make it a day of rest and amusement—sometimes the amusement ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... frivolity can well be pardoned on account of its absurdity. The great work of the world is so broad, so deep, so high, that it calls for the best endeavors of all girls and boys, women and men. That the door of opportunity is henceforth to be open to all is an assurance ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak, rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff among her laborious ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... and yet the pride of men! The laws of nature are unchangeable and profound—our minds are full of illusion and frivolity—and yet we would comprehend every thing—determine every thing! Forgetting that it is easier for the whole human race to be in error, than to change the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... he published a little volume describing the whole affair, in which, with the irresponsible frivolity of a true Capuchin, he poked fun at those who could not ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the example of Alfieri, there was another motive at work—a determination to prove to the world that he was the master of his own temperament, and that, if he chose, he could cast away frivolity and cynicism, and clothe himself with austerity "as with a garment." He had been taken to task for "treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices" (Blackwood's Edin. Mag., August, 1819), and here was ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... compromise, because I do not understand the world, and do not serve its uses! If I only knew all the book-gossip of the hour, and all the platitudes of the reviews! If only I knew anything of all the infinite frivolity and puerility that occupies the minds of men! But I do not, and so I am an outcast, and must work as a ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... he should bestir himself to withstand the pressure exerted by Giles, by Medora herself, by Bond, by mischievous Clytie Summers, by the whole idle horde of studio loungers to force him into such an atmosphere of frivolity, license and dissipation as could not but inwrap one of those ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... comb to the other; while the letters "I. H. S." on the priest's chasuble were paraphrased into the words, "I hate Siwashes." It must not be thought, however, that Derby's life was wholly devoted to fun and frivolity, for he has been pronounced by an accomplished military writer and critic to have been "an able and accomplished engineer." He was the author of "The Squibob Papers" and of "Phoenixiana; or Sketches and Burlesques," ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... an old hand now, and didn't even know into what category she really fitted. Was it, after all, impossible that behind all this frivolity the desire to take up the struggle for existence on cleanly terms ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... capriciously, clandestinely, without giving notice, when she had left her to understand that she was simply spending three or four days in town. It was bad taste and bad form, it was cabotin and had the mark of Selina's complete, irremediable frivolity—the worst accusation (Laura tried to cling to that opinion) that she laid herself open to. Of course frivolity that was never ashamed of itself was like a neglected cold—you could die of it morally as well as of anything else. Laura knew this and it was why ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... passionate sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her and made her his own forever, by saving her from that horrible risk. The maze in which he had but now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering scruples which he had felt from the first were gone; gone all his care for his world. His world? In that supreme moment, there was no world but in the tender eyes at which he looked ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... almost ridiculously trivial, arrested and absorbed his attention; even as when our eyes have become accustomed to darkness, every light-coloured mote shows luminous against the void blackness of night. So we are tempted to unseemly frivolity in churches, and at funerals, and all most solemn moments; and so Lancelot found his imagination fluttering back, half amused, to every smallest circumstance of the last few weeks, as objects of mere ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... his clothes, unhappy if he were deprived of his bottle and his game. Haggart, on the other hand, was before all things sealed to his profession. He would have deserted the gayest masquerade, had he ever strayed into so light a frivolity, for the chance of lightening a pocket. He tasted but few amusements without the limits of his craft, and he preserved unto the end a touch of that dour character which is the heritage of his race. But, withal, he was an amiable decent body, who would have recoiled in horror from the ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... although she had been head-mistress of the great Middleton School now for several years, she had never before met quite such an extraordinary specimen as Kitty Malone. Where, however, others would see nothing but a spirit of frivolity, a love of admiration, dress, pleasure, in Kitty, Miss Sherrard peeped below the surface and discovered some really noble qualities. She determined to be very gentle to this wild, willful girl—to take her, in short, ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... just before the war cloud burst, covering all that part of the world, I was stopping for some weeks at the Hotel Nassau. It stands in the main street, opposite the park gate leading to the Casino. All the world went to Wiesbaden to be amused. However fashionable frivolity and vice may be elsewhere, here it was strictly de rigueur, and to pretend to decency and sobriety would be to stamp one's self a heathen and barbarian, all unversed in the glorious flower-wreathed Primrose ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... not," answered Dick seriously. "But you may say, if you like, that I shall be very pleased to see Her Majesty and do what I can for her. And pray try to be serious, Phil, for once in a way; frivolity is well enough at a proper time, and in its proper place, but it will not improve these people's opinion of us if they see us laughing and obviously joking over a matter that seems to be a serious enough one for them, and may be sufficiently serious ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... great interests of life will agree that nothing gave them greater pleasure or more genuine education.... Perhaps one reason why some American children are aggressive and lacking in respect is the frivolity of the talk that goes on in some American families. If children are in the right atmosphere they will not be intrusive or impertinent. Make place for their interests, their questions, the problems of their experience; for there are young ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... caro mio," was the reply. "It's such a bore, you know: and then I half think I promised to take La Montmorenci of the Frivolity up the Cherwell to Trumpington ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... there's a new thing on at the Frivolity—awfully good," he said. "Miss Foster might like to see it. We could make up a ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... thoughts, but not when in her company." M. Reville goes on: "Such a character could not understand the sensitiveness, the shrinking, morbid melancholy of the husband thrust upon her. Her gaiety, her devotion to pleasure, the frivolity of her talk, could only pain more and more a man of a gloomy temperament, who took the greatest care of his health, who fretted himself over the most trivial details, and ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... good birth were judged worthy to share the Queen's work, and lived with her, it would seem, in a kind of seclusion, seeing only such chosen visitors as Margaret brought with her to cheer their labours, and forswearing all idle talk and frivolity. The Queen had such austerity mingled with her graciousness and such grace with her severity, says her monkish biographer, loving an antithesis, that all feared and respected her presence. "Her life was full of moderation and gentleness, her speech ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... blood. It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility. There is a fond of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths are seldom probed; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity and sometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on the surface and to cover up the inner void. Certain moralists, without meaning to be satirical, often say that the sovereign cure for unhappiness is work. Unhappily, the work they recommend is better ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... or rather I thought I understood, for how could I admit that Lupin, a man so essentially level-headed under his mask of frivolity, could waste his time upon such childish nonsense? What he was counting was the intermittent flashes of a ray of sunlight playing on the dingy front of the opposite house, at the height ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... about the culinary methods of Turcomans, Persians, and Curds; the operations of the hammam or bath are disclosed to us, and we are surreptitously introduced along with the hero to the mysteries the Persian harem or anderun, and its petty existence, inane frivolity, open jealousy, and clandestine intrigue. The death and funeral of the old barber provide an opportunity for a valuable account of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... against the dressing-room windows of their new house in one of the hilly suburbs of San Francisco, and threatening the unseasonable frivolity of the stucco ornamentation of cornice and balcony. Mrs. Tucker had been called from the contemplation of the dreary prospect without by the arrival of a visitor. On entering the drawing-room she found him engaged in a half admiring, half resentful examination of its new furniture and hangings. Mrs. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... columns. Humour trickles from paragraph to paragraph; wit coruscates in the accounts of the most ordinary police cases; and abundant of dexterous literary workmanship is to be found in the leading articles. In spite of such admirable qualities, there is an element of frivolity, a lack of seriousness (I speak of the typical Boulevard sheet) that is at first rather shocking to a British reader. He finds grave subjects treated with a fineness of touch and a lucidity of reasoning at once charming and full ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... intend to proceed seriously on this trial so long threatened.— Perhaps I may have before noticed to you that the convention never seemed capable of any thing great or uniform, and that all their proceedings took a tinge from that frivolity and meanness which I am almost tempted to believe inherent in the French character. They have just now, amidst a long string of decrees, the objects of which are of the first consequence, inserted one for the destruction of all the royal tombs before the tenth ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... pleasures, and duties as I conceived it to be, was to introduce Turl and Wilmot to such of my higher order of acquaintance as might afford both parties gratification. There is much frivolity among people of rank and fashion: but there is likewise some enquiry and sound understanding; and, where these qualities exist in any eminent degree, the friends I have named could ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... benefactions, rendered Patipata as handsome as he was amiable, and the nuptials were celebrated with suitable pomp and festivity. We are informed that Papillette had, at first, some slight returns of her natural disposition; but in one year she became a mother, and from thenceforward never knew frivolity more. ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... a great deal of good in her, mixed up with a terrible amount of frivolity, comes forward so quietly that Tita's sudden whiteness is ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... frivolity. Like every aspect of life, and like most persons, it is a hint and suggestion of something high and poetic. It is an oasis of repose in the desert of our American hurry. It ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... home school, under the immediate training of his father and his uncle, both of them good Scotch classical scholars, and one of them at least a proficient in mathematics. No doubt the human mind, especially in its best estate of juvenile vigor and frivolity, has remarkable aptitude for the repulsion of unwelcome knowledge; but it can hardly be said that even Patrick Henry's gift in that direction could have prevented his becoming, under two such masters, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... suffering and unhappiness. The ancient Greeks required that the husband should be twenty years older than the wife; but this custom was no more reasonable than that of another nation which required that only old and young should marry, so that the sobriety of the old might restrain the frivolity of the young. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... their own consciences, their own beliefs. In England these men came to be called Puritans. They were deeply earnest; religion was ever in their thoughts; they had protested even against the wickedness of the theatre in Shakespeare's time; and now as they watched the light frivolity of the court they became imbittered. They called Charles the "man of sin." Round these stern fanatics began to centre the general opposition ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... fiction are written without one single new situation, original character, or fresh thought. The most out-worn ideas: sudden loss of fortune; struggles; faithlessness of First Lover; noble conduct of Second Lover: frivolity of younger sister; excellence of mother: naughtiness of one son, virtue of another, these are habitually served up again and again. On the sprained ankles, the mad bulls, the fires, and other simple devices for doing without an introduction between ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... characters from life, did not draw wholesale; he would take only a portion of a character that pleased him and work it up in combination with another distinct character. It was thus he dealt with Leigh Hunt, borrowing his amusing, airy frivolity, and combining it with the meanness and heartlessness of Skimpole. I have always fancied that Dowler in "Pickwick" was founded—after this composite principle—on his true-hearted but imperious friend, Forster. Forster ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... House, where his friendship had been my one comfort and hope; of our early days in London, when it seemed as if, with one another for company, nothing could come amiss, and no hardship could be quite intolerable; of his illness and absence, and my gradual yielding to frivolity and extravagance; then of his return and confidence in me. Would that he had never told me that wretched secret! If he had only known to whom he was telling it, to what a pitiful, weak, vain nature he was confiding it, ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... talk can be idler? And yet haven't we seen grave people and gay listening very contentedly at times to that wild and awful sort of frivolity; and I think there is in most men's minds, sages or zanies, a secret misgiving that dreams may have an office and a meaning, and are perhaps more than a fortuitous concourse of symbols, in fact, the language which good or evil spirits ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Gothic: it can hardly be too frank in its confession of rudeness, hardly too rich in its changefulness, hardly too faithful in its naturalism; but it may go too far in its rigidity, and, like the great Puritan spirit in its extreme, lose itself either in frivolity of division, or perversity of purpose.[67] It actually did so in its later times; but it is gladdening to remember that in its utmost nobleness, the very temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the Protestant spirit of self-dependence and inquiry, was expressed in its every ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Heloise to the broken turf on the new grave of poverty only designated by a wooden cross; gray clouds flitted along the zenith, and a pale streak of light defined the wide horizon; Paris with its frivolity, temples, business, pleasures, trophies and teeming life, sent up a confused and low murmur in the distance; only the wind was audible among the tombs. Never had the beautiful Church of England services appeared to me so grand and pathetic as when here read over the coffin of one who had died in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that they may be able to talk statecraft there; how princely compacts and contracts of marriage are made at sulphur springs; all these and such like leaked out as small-talk with a young and pretty woman, whose frivolity of manner went bail for the safety of the confidence, and went far to persuade Walpole, that though bank-stock might be a surer investment, there were paying qualities in certain women that in the end promised larger returns than mere money and higher rewards than mere ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... lame kind of assent, my love! Maggie, you will have to gently lure this young person into the paths of frivolity. I promise you, my dear, that you shall be a very cultivated woman some day; but I only promise this if you will take advantage of all sides of the pleasant life here. Now tell me what are your particular tastes? What branch of study do ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... this; no man works for nothing. If Poussette harbours you, as he does, he must exact something, if only silly songs and smiles, the faculty of amusing him now that he has dropped drinking, and must feed his lower senses in some manner. I impute no more—no more than frivolity and waste of time, the abasement of impulses noble enough ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. Sons of the world, oh, speed those years; But while we wait, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because "Germany's political institutions and laws, and our nice Frenchified customs would not permit this humor." "On the one side," he goes on to say, "is Gothic formality; on the other, frivolity." Later in the volume (p.191) he confines the use of humorous characters to subordinate rles; otherwise, he says, the tendency to exaggeration would easily awaken displeasure and disgust. Yet in a footnote, prompted by ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... curtains, the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent colouring and their vulgar material—the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art—all this modern crudity runs riot over the relics of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Julian stood in the acute presence of the lady of the feathers. At first he scarcely recognized her, for she had discarded her crown of glory and now faced him in the strange frivolity of her hatless touzled hair. She stood by the square table covered with a green cloth, that occupied the centre of the small room, which communicated by folding doors with an inner chamber. A pastile ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... making art serve two masters, it is not rendered thereby more worthy of a philosophic treatment. Instead of being an end in itself, art is degraded into a means of appealing to higher aims, on the one hand, and to frivolity and idleness on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... rather sudden from the study of character in the first part to the demand in the last that if you have tears you must prepare to shed them now. The brightness is quenched in gloom and despair. Of a verity, frivolity may be fatal, and death may follow a liking for private theatricals and the other empty amusements of fashion; but is it worth while to break a butterfly on the wheel and to put a humming-bird to the question? To say what fate shall be meted out to the woman taken in adultery is always a hard task ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... I am glad to hear it: for I scorn a life of frivolity; but then, again, I should not like to give up everything, you know." Mrs. Dodd looked a little staggered, too, at so vast a scheme of capitulation But "everything" was soon explained to mean balls, concerts, dinner-parties in general, tea-parties without exposition ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... her own secrets or character, into frank talk about himself. All unconsciously he began to lay bare to his listener the infirmities of his erring, open heart. Silently she looked down, and plumbed them all,—the frivolity, the recklessness, the half gay, half mournful sense of waste and ruin. There, blooming amongst the wrecks, she saw the fairest flowers of noble manhood profuse and fragrant still,—generosity and courage and disregard for self. Spendthrift and ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mrs. Carter exactly said so, yet we gathered the idea that those were days of much dress and frivolity. It seems that ships came from everywhere with handsome fabrics and costly trifles; and that rich colonials strove so manfully and so womanfully to follow the capricious foreign fashions (by means of dressed dolls received from Paris and London) that usually they were not more than ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... was eager to gossip about Miss Preston's approaching marriage, where she was going, and what she was to wear. Lucy drew off from her companion as soon as Nancy Parker joined them, partly from a real desire of thinking quietly of her teacher's parting words, partly in proud disdain of Bessie's frivolity. "How can she go on so," she thought, "after what Miss Preston has been saying?" But she forgot that disdain is as far removed from the spirit of the loving and pitying Saviour as ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... be irreproachable and, if that involved friendlessness, it could not be helped. Besides, he had no very high opinion of the English. So far as he could see, they cared for nothing but fox-hunting and Sunday observances; they oscillated between an undue frivolity and an undue gloom; if you spoke to them of friendly joyousness they stared; and they did not understand either the Laws of Thought or the wit of a German University. Since it was clear that with such people he could have very little in ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... living common sense, that they would have been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... of Achmed III. was full of all manner of fantastic sentiments. Faith, hope, and love, which make others strong, had in him degenerated into superstition, frivolity, and voluptuousness—already he was but ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... about water parties that predisposes to flirtation. Atlantic voyages and trips to India are notorious for fostering such sweet frivolity. I really feel quite afraid of walking about to-day for dread of unknowingly interfering. It wouldn't be discreet, for instance, to intrude upon that couple so snugly ensconced under the shelter of the paddle-box. I don't know, but he is ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... house brought its amazement over the "dig's" frivolity to Betty, but she had very little to tell them. "All I know is that she's awfully pleased about being a friend of T. Reed's. And oh yes—she's invited out to dinner next Sunday. But of course there ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... soul shrouded among the fathomless mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us rarely, in the illimitable visions that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 'I won't encourage any son of mine against my conscience and my principles. If you choose to live a life of frivolity and idleness, you shall not lead it under my roof; so you know what to expect if you persist in ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... and he was destined to lie in prison long, for his trial did not come on for two years. The law's delays have been proverbial in all countries and at all eras; and the law of imperial Rome was not likely to be free from this reproach during the reign of Nero, a man of such frivolity that any engagement of pleasure or freak of caprice was sufficient to make him put off the most important call of business. The imprisonment, it is true, was of the mildest description. It may have been that the officer who brought ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... was called an "Academy," a school in the largest town of the island. Caius loved his books, and became a youthful scholar. In the summer he did light work on the farm; the work was of a quiet, monotonous sort, for his parents were no friends to frivolity ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... my Lord Gambara supped with us, and he was light and trivial as ever, an incarnation of frivolity and questionable jests, apparently entirely unconscious of Fifanti's chill reserve and frequent sneers. Indeed, I greatly marvelled that a man of my Lord Gambara's eminence and Governor of Piacenza should so very amiably endure the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... emerged from the gulf of that speculative despondency, and wore buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigor. Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder preeminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the good people of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... have him stay. Every moment he thought Primrose more bewitching. For when one decided she was all froth and gayety, the serious side would come out and a tenderness that suggested her mother. It was not all frivolity, and he found she was wonderfully well-read for a girl of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... and courtesy were so well balanced in this society, that little restraint was put upon conversation. A risque word, the stray touch of a too daring hand or foot, or a whisper behind a fan, which was in truth a furtive kiss, with a hundred other trifling liberties, were permitted. Frivolity enveloped the company as with a silken veil, and yet everything moved as politely and as sedately as ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... confused their principles, so that no man may distinguish them except as the Ins and Outs. An age of greedy privilege and sullen poverty, of blatant luxury and curious envy, of rising palaces and vanishing homes, of stupid frivolity and idiotic publicomania; in which four hundred gilded fribbles give monkey-dinners and Louis XV. revels, while four million ungilded gossips gape at them and read about them in the newspapers. An age when princes of finance ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... in these verses to be chanting to herself those songs of her mother's race to which she always turned with tears of pleasure. They breathe a Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper, and are singularly devoid of that littleness and frivolity which seem, if we may judge by a slight experience, to be the bane ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... and affection; now that the complicated passions of refined and artificial life are becoming less important than the broad, deep, genuine manifestations of the common mind, we may hope for a bolder and more courageous literature: we may hope to see the drama free itself from sensualism and frivolity, and rise to the Shaksperian dignity of true passion; while the romance will learn better its true ground, and will create, rather than portray—delineate, rather than dissect ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... women's clubs or flirt with the suffragettes, but the majority can get all of the intellectual stimulation they crave in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, with Vogue added for its fashions. Most of them, deep down in their hearts, suspect their husbands of secret frivolity, and about ten per cent. have the proofs, but it is rare for them to make rows about it, and the divorce rate among them is thus very low. Themselves indifferent cooks, they are unable to teach their servants the art, and so the ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... indiscriminate. She lived and gloried in a chronic state of overwork, for which no one but herself saw the necessity. Her conversation about it only confirmed the frivolous persons whom she tried to convert to "social service," in their frivolity. After a quarter of an hour's conversation with her, Tatham was generally dumb, and as nearly rude as his temperament allowed. While, as to his own small efforts, his cottages, County Council, and the rest, no blandishments would have drawn from him a word about them; ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... troops rushed on, Stuart shouted, "Charge! and remember Jackson!" and this watchword seemed to drive the line forward. With Stuart leading them, and singing, in his joyous voice, "Old Joe Hooker, will you come out of the Wilderness!"—for courage, poetry, and seeming frivolity, were strangely mingled in this great soldier—the troops went headlong at the Federal works, and in a few moments the real struggle of the battle of Chancellorsville ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... letters. The decline of literature followed close upon that of the political power of Spain. The splendid empire of Charles V had sunk, from causes inherent in the policies of that over-ambitious monarch, through the somber bigotry of Philip II, the ineptitude of Philip III, the frivolity of Philip IV, to the imbecility of Charles II; and the death of the last of the Hapsburg rulers in 1700 left Spain in a deplorably enfeebled condition physically and intellectually. The War of the Succession ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... wisdom and sarcastic irony in the expression of his countenance, while he gazed for a moment around the court-yard, and then resumed his former look upward, he might have been taken by an artist as the model of an old philosopher of the Cynic school, musing upon the frivolity of mortal pursuits, and the precarious tenure of human possessions, and looking up to the source from which aught permanently good can alone be derived. The young lady, as she presented her tall and elegant figure at the open window, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Brookenham took without wincing whatever, as between a masterful relative and an exposed frivolity, might have been the sting of it. "That you must ask Edward. I ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... inlaid with distorted figures and symbols and toned in all luridness of color, into which has been tossed a poor sort of flower plucked from any bush the owner happened to pass, which has been salted down in frivolity—or perhaps something stronger. I'll keep the lid on to-night, for you wouldn't ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... answered. "In Paris your sister appeared to me to be a charming student of frivolity. Here she seems to have developed into a brilliant woman with more character and steadfastness than I should ever have given her credit for. Her features are the same, yet the change has written its mark into her face. Do you know, Lady Ferringhall, I am proud ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of causes and circumstances had impressed him with a conviction that what is called fashionable life was a compound of frivolity and fraud, of folly and vice; and he resolved never to enter it. To this he was, perhaps, in some degree unconsciously prompted by his reserved disposition, and by his painful sense of inexperience, for he looked forward to this world with almost as much of apprehension as of dislike. To politics, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... ghosts—the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... to appear in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure. The extent to which this obvious safeguard was overlooked may be taken as a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the censorship. It should be added that the artistic representation of a bath, with every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to decency allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic art. From the Rhine maidens in Wagner's Trilogy, and the bathers in ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... C. Matthews played Lady and Lord Whiffle—two also exceedingly difficult characters, but by these performers most delicately handled. They are a very young, inexperienced (almost childish), and quarrelsome couple. Frivolity so extreme as they were required to represent demands the utmost nicety of colouring to rescue it from silliness and inanity. But the actors kept their portraits well up to a pleasing standard, and made them both quite spirituels (more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... they habitually express by it the rejection, or the neglect, of pleasure in some of its forms; of beauty, of ornament, or of amusement. Nor is the term thus ignorantly misapplied solely in disparagement, but occasionally in compliment; as though it implied superiority to frivolity and the mere pleasures of the moment. And this perverted use is the only one in which the word is popularly known, and the one from which the new generation are acquiring their sole notion of its meaning. Those who introduced the word, but who had for many years discontinued it as a distinctive ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... had wasted eight months of most precious time; they had heard and made orations, they had read and written protocols, they had witnessed banquets, masquerades, and revels of stupendous frivolity, in honour of the English Garter, brought solemnly to the Valois by Lord Derby, accompanied by one hundred gentlemen "marvellously, sumptuously, and richly accoutred," during that dreadful winter when the inhabitants ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it was like a grotesque pantomime with no directing head. Nautch girls tripped along laughing and chatting, bracelets jingling, and tiny bells at their ankles tinkling musically. It depressed him; it was such a terrible juxtaposition of frivolity and the gloomed shadow of idol worship that lay just the bridge's span of the sullen Narbudda: the gloomy, broken scraps of the long since deserted forts that cut with jagged lines the moonlit sky; and beyond them again the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... the Lifted Cross—once a fashionable quarter: now mean, dejected, incongruously thronged, and fast losing the last appearances of respectability. Sombre without—half-lit, silent, vast within: the whole intolerant of frivolity, inharmony, garishness, ugliness, but yet quite free of gloom and ghostly suggestion. The boy tiptoed over the thick carpets, spoke in whispers, eyed the shadowy corners—sensitive to impressions, forever alert: ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... breathes, descended from the grandmother to the mother, and were even instilled, in some degree, into the heart of the son. They remained, however, latent and dormant through the long years of the monarch's life of frivolity and sin, but they revived and reasserted their dominion when the ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... sit down to chess and then Fyne's everlasting gravity became faintly tinged by an attenuated gleam of something inward which resembled sly satisfaction. Of the divine frivolity of laughter he was only capable over a chessboard. Certain positions of the game struck him as humorous, which nothing else on earth ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... "was fairly furrowed in every direction by students, who often travelled afoot and barefoot to save their shoes." These wayfarers were light-hearted and often empty-handed; they were in quest of knowledge, but the intensity of the search was tempered by gaiety and ease of mood. Under a mask of frivolity, however, youth often wears a serious face, and behind apparent aimlessness there is often a steady and final turning of the ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... obscured and perverted: cursed effects of fashionable education! of which both sexes are the advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could foresee that Theo. would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope, by her, to convince the world what neither sex appear to believe—that ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... butterfly! She did not care a rush when her good old grandfather died, and I don't believe she has one fraction more love for Mrs. Brownlow, or Allen, or anybody else. The best thing I can see is that she is too young to perceive the prudence of securing Allen; but perhaps that is only frivolity, and he, poor fellow, is so devoted to her, that it is quite provoking to see how she trifles with ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... godless world-power, and Belshazzar was the incarnation of the spirit which made Babylon. So Daniel's indictment gathers together the main forms of sin, which cleave to every godless national or individual life. And he begins with that feather-brained frivolity which will learn nothing by example. Nebuchadnezzar's fate might have taught his successors what came of God-forgetting arrogance, and attributing success to oneself; and his restoration might have been an object-lesson ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... three foul corruptors of a language: caprice, affectation, and ignorance! Such fashionable cant terms as "theatricals," and "musicals," invented by the flippant Topham, still survive among his confraternity of frivolity. A lady eminent for the elegance of her taste, and of whom one of the best judges, the celebrated Miss Edgeworth, observed to me, that she spoke the purest and most idiomatic English she had ever heard, threw out an observation which might be extended to a great deal of our ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Jerusalem. In position and in character (largely resulting from the position) he was uncommonly like those semi-independent rajahs in India, who are allowed to keep up a kind of shadow of authority on condition of doing what Calcutta bids them. Of course frivolity and debauchery become the business of such men. What sort of a man this was may be sufficiently inferred from the fact that Bernice ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... his mother had cried over her own appearance often, before she became indifferent; and if he had known, he would have thought it only typical of the weakness and frivolity which he had heard attributed to Lady Mary from ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... fret of routine's slavish toil, They meet once more in freedom's jollity. No thought of care comes to them now to spoil The merry jest, the gay frivolity." ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to be on horseback. The conception of riding on horseback for a lady was, in Darya Alexandrovna's mind, associated with ideas of youthful flirtation and frivolity, which, in her opinion, was unbecoming in Anna's position. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was at once reconciled to her riding. In spite of her elegance, everything was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... strenuous efforts to maintain and educate the orphans. Even when the police official was spending his evenings at the theatre, the worthy actor generally filled his place in the family circle, and it seems had frequently to appease my mother, who, rightly or wrongly, complained of the frivolity ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... continually turned upon Sadie. There is surely some wrecker angel which can only gather her best treasures in moments of disaster. For here were all these worldlings going to their doom, and already frivolity and selfishness had passed away from them, and each was thinking and grieving only for the other. Sadie thought of her aunt, her aunt thought of Sadie, the men thought of the women, Belmont thought of his wife,—and then he thought of something else ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... commanded by all other branches of Literature as well as the ennobling sentiments inspired by religion, patriotism and other affections of the human heart. An elevating mission, indeed, be it only directed in a worthy course. Frivolity and license are alike the bane of literature and art. Earnestness of purpose and severity of moral tone are the stamina of both. Shorn of these, both alike find their strength is gone from them. It is consoling to reflect that notwithstanding ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... irregular, but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. 'I soon weary of a pursuit,' he said to me, laughing; it would almost ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in England than he, but his skill was various, and he knew tricks of the trade which this primitive Norman could never have learnt. He had some touch of wit, some biting observation, and, as he neared the place of the encounter, he played upon the coming event with a mordant frivolity. Not by nature a brave man, he was so much a fatalist, such a worshipper of his star, that he had acquired an artificial courage which had served him well. The unschooled gentlemen with him roared with laughter ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which frustrate more or less the fullest illumination. Freely he exhibits these shadows. Neither Bossuet nor Louis XIV., neither Voltaire nor Beranger, is spared, nor the French character, with its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... a fair fight, M. de Duc," replied the young Marquis, awed in spite of all his frivolity, his light-heartedness, by this ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Chapin house freshmen but the whole class with an absurd "rumor" of her own invention. Helen Adams, Betty's roommate, was a forlorn, awkward little body, who came to college expecting to study all the time, and was amazed and disappointed at what she considered the frivolity of her companions. Betty Wales, in particular, with her fascinating, merry ways, her love of fun, and her easygoing fashion of getting through her work, was a revelation to Helen. She began by placing her roommate rather scornfully in the category of pretty ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... really that, of course—to a Maitland party. Yet the child had just as good blood in her veins as many others who would attend, even if her lot in life were less fortunate. Besides, was it right to disturb her quiet habits by such frivolity? While the matter was pending, Alfaretta could only calm her perturbed mind by gathering every belated daisy she could find and testing her fortune upon its white petals. "Shall I be let to go? Shall I not?" Mostly, the daisies said: "I shall!" Yet it was old Whitey who, ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... you are made up of fancies and caprices. Your mind wants balance," said Miss Skipwith, affronted at this frivolity. "Had you not better go for a walk with your dog? Doddery tells me that poor Argus has not had a good run ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... arisen from chivalry, still remained on the surface, but its language was that of cold, unmeaning flattery; and, from being the arbiters of honour, they became the mere ministers of amusement. They were again consigned to that frivolity, into which they relapse as easily as men do into ferocity. The respect they inspired, was felt individually or occasionally, but not for their sex. Any thing serious addressed to them, was introduced with an apology, or in the manner we now address children whom we desire ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... noblemen, and this he was able to do by virtue of his theatrical successes, and, more helpful still, by a levity of character which stuck to him despite his great earnestness in many directions. Perhaps his frivolity and his love of pleasure, including the delights of the gaming table, may have been half assumed; perhaps he was only playing one of his many parts. He certainly succeeded in the role; he enlivened the dissipations of many a beau by his quaint ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... till four, when he comes home and has tea, after which we ride or drive or play tennis somewhere. A look in at the Club for a game of billiards, more work, dinner, and, if we are not going to a dance or any frivolity, a quiet talk, a smoke, a few more papers gone through, bed, and the long Indian day is over. All day chuprassis, like attendant angels, flit in and out bearing piles of documents marked Urgent, which they ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... head above them. All the school were alike in their love and enthusiasm for literature; and really they seemed to have had a better mode of living and thinking than have the smart gentlemen who think that earnest and conscientious study is only a heavy species of frivolity. And let it be marked that this wide-spread company of private citizens and public writers by no means formed a mutual admiration society, for they criticised each other sharply and wisely; and the criticism was taken in good part by all concerned. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... and returning to the plant by an early train on Monday morning. Life at Edison was of the simple kind—work, meals, and a few hours' sleep—day by day. The little village, called into existence by the concentrating works, was of the most primitive nature and offered nothing in the way of frivolity or amusement. Even the scenery is austere. Hence Edison was enabled to follow his natural bent in being surrounded day and night by his responsible chosen associates, with whom he worked uninterrupted by outsiders from early morning away ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... impudent, and drunk." Her court exhibited form without dignity, and her parliaments the most violent partisanship in politics and religion, without sincerity or substance in either. But the long peace threw open the floodgates of frivolity and fashion once more, and France again ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... frivolity of this kind; and Tempest, ever since his recovery last term, had been rapidly regaining all his ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... her frivolity by sharing it. Kind beyond her utmost merit. She did not say so, but she thought it, sitting dumb, in sudden tears, and burning with shame for her blindness to the hour's fearful realities. While Ned stepped to Watson's ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... legitimate policy, when duly expressed by the legislature. Such lawfully expressed and deliberate judgment should be given effect by the courts, save in the extreme and exceptional cases where there has been a clear violation of a constitutional provision. Anything like frivolity or wantonness in upsetting such clearly taken governmental action is a grave offense against the Republic. To protest against tyranny, to protect minorities from oppression, to nullify an act committed in a spasm of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... course, with the accepted mediation; whilst that others cannot be persuaded to make this so necessary step, in the opinion that we cannot draw any advantage, or at least of much importance, from a more strict connection with America: Reasons, according to the petitioners, the frivolity of which is apparent to every one who is not filled with prejudice, without having occasion to employ many words to point it out. For, as to the first point, supposing, for a moment, that it might be made a question whether ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... once more, but they were no longer tears of despair. Pulling myself together, I set about writing out a fresh set of rules, in the assured conviction that never again would I do a wrong action, waste a single moment on frivolity, or alter the rules which I ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... believe was dictated by musical reasons, the German work chosen to end the evening was the final scene from Die Meistersinger, with its ringing couplet from Hans Sachs, in which he denounces foreign insincerity and foreign frivolity (Waelschen Dunst mit waelschen Tand). This lack of courtesy—though the words were really nonsense when this very concert was given to show that foreign art could not be ignored—would not be worth ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... learn whether their coming to this place be but the whim of a moment, or a plan for a longer stay: if the latter, farewell, solitude! farewell, study!—farewell!—Yes, I must make room for gaiety, and mere frivolity. Yet could I willingly submit to all; but, should the Countess give me new proofs of her attachment, perhaps of her respect, Oh! how will my conscience upbraid me! Or—I shudder at the thought! if this seat be visited by company, and chance should conduct hither any of my ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... Tara spent most of her days in the orchard with the pups. When tired of their frivolity, she would retire to the roots of the oak tree and give them to understand that they were not to bother her further, or she would leap the gate leading into the garden, leaving her offspring gaping admiringly upon its orchard side, and stroll ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... appeared indifference, frivolity, and mirth; this being considered, especially by the females, as conducive to health. Seldom was the body followed by even ten or twelve attendants; and instead of the usual bearers and sextons, hirelings of the lowest of the populace undertook the office for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of her husband that these trifling outside coquetries should not disquiet him nor render him distrustful, and that he should repose the most unshaken confidence in her. Her pride revolted against his suspicions, as did his jealousy against her seeming frivolity; and both became quite willing, at last, to separate, notwithstanding the love they really bore each other at the bottom of their hearts, had not their children rendered such a separation impossible. These children were ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... at me—a wreck." After a moment he added: "You think Myra Nell is all frivolity and glitter, but she isn't; she's as deep as the sea, Norvin. I can't tell you how glad I am that you two— "Blake stirred uneasily. "I—I admire you tremendously, for you're just what I wanted to be and couldn't. I'm talking foolishly, I know, but this Carnival has made me see Myra Nell ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the characters of those with whom he lives or converses, must keep up the appearance of a kind of recklessness and frivolity, for the mind closes itself up like the hedgehog, at the least sensible touch of observation, and will not be afterwards drawn out. Men have been known in the middle of a discovery of their character, to be stopped short by a look, which brought them to themselves, and traced before them in an instant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... the honest English word) some maundering form of religion, which, to judge from their own conduct, they usually only half believe; those who seem, on six days of the week, as fond of finery and frivolity as any other gay worldlings, and on the seventh join eagerly in hymns in which (in one case at least) they inform the Almighty God of truth, who will not be mocked, that they lie awake at night, weeping because ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... happiness from him. And yet Petey went through school with a cloud over his young life, in the shape of a Pa who gave him a thousand dollars a year for expenses and wouldn't allow a single cent of it to be spent for frivolity. And he had a blanket definition for frivolity that covered everything from dancing parties to pie at an all-night lunch counter. By hard work Petey could spend about four hundred dollars on necessary expenses, and that left him six hundred dollars a year to blow ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... perceived that he found in his sister a companionship of which she did not feel capable. But to Theodora herself, whenever she succeeded in engrossing Arthur, it seemed a victory of sisterly affection and sense over beauty and frivolity. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... senior girls, was duly invited; but no one deemed that she would accept the invitation, because her grandfather had been heard to say that education was one thing, and frivolity another. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... when I am done. I loved you, Maurice; for, of all the gay, idle, pleasure-seeking men I saw about me, you were the only one who seemed to have a thought beyond the folly of the hour. Under the seeming frivolity of your life lay something noble, heroic, and true. I felt that you had a purpose, that your present mood was but transitory—a young man's holiday, before the real work of his life began. This attracted, this won me; for even in the brief regard you then gave me, there was ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... the flame bursts forth Where an opening is presented. "This," they told me, "is the villa Of delights, the bath of pleasures, The abode of the luxurious, Where are punished all those women Who were in the other life, From frivolity excessive, Too much given to scented waters, Unguents, rouges, baths, and perfumes."— I went in, and there beheld, In a tank of cold snow melted, Many lovely women bathing, With an upturned look of terror; Underneath the water they Were the prey of snakes and ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... born at Anagnia of an equestrian family. He was a man of loose morality, not without intellectual gifts, who by indulging in frivolity posed as a wit. In Nero's time he had acted in a harlequinade at the Juvenalian Games.[170] At first he pleaded compulsion, but afterwards he acted voluntarily, and his performances were rather clever than respectable. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... seemed, was the knife and boot boy at the "Blue Boar", "did a bit" with the gloves, and was willing to spar with Sheen provided Mr Bevan made it all right with the guv'nor; saw, that is so say, that he did not get into trouble for passing in unprofessional frivolity moments which should have been sacred to knives and boots. These terms having been agreed to, he ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for them that the king, in spite of his ill-health, looked now with a favorable eye upon frivolity, and that a sport was toward with which their palates for pleasure were not already jaded, and they were as gleeful as children at the ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... will come!" observed Dulce, overjoyed at the idea of a holiday; but, seeing Nan's face was full of rebuke at this outburst of frivolity, she ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... "Oh, not from any frivolity or irreverence, but because the music, which sounds so grandly impressive here in the Sistine Chapel, strikes one as a mere confusion of ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... disposition was grave and reflective; and though he was not without wit, it was rarely used. He lived, necessarily, with the frivolous and the ostentatious, yet ostentation and frivolity were charges never brought against himself. As a diplomatist and a statesman, he was of the old and erroneous school of intriguers; but his favourite policy was the science of conciliation. He was one who would so far have suited the present age, that no man ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works at Deir-el-Bahari." By all means let Senmut be mentioned, and then let him be utterly forgotten. A radiant queen reigns here—a queen of fantasy and splendor, and of that divine shallowness—refined frivolity literally cut into the mountain—which is the note of Deir-el-Bahari. And what a clever background! Oh, Hatshepsu knew what she was doing when she built her temple here. It was not the solemn Senmut (he wore a beard, I'm sure) who ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... had renounced the frivolities of life. He was there for rest, quiet, and study. He was adamant. That evening the invitation was again extended to him, the truth being that there was a scarcity of young men, as is usually the case at such functions. Plonville was about to re-state his objections to frivolity when through the open door he caught a glimpse of two of the arriving guests ascending the stair. The girl had on a long opera cloak with some fluffy white material round the neck and down the front. A filmy lace arrangement ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... second glance to assure herself of what Judy had done and she frowned and compressed her lips. When the service was over, she made a little impromptu address to the students. College, she said, was a place for serious work and not for frivolity. Of course there were no objections to innocent fun, but absurdities would not be tolerated. All the time she was speaking she was looking straight at Judy, who, with chin resting on her hand and ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... politically non-existent, was the quality of its head. When in the palace profusion and intrigue took the place of Frederick the Great's unflagging labour, the old uprightness, industry, and precision which had been the pride of Prussian administration fell out of fashion everywhere. Yet the frivolity of the Court was a less active cause of military decline than the abandonment of the first principles of Prussian policy. [13] If any political sentiment existed in the nation, it was the sentiment of antagonism ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... perfecting. It was energy, patriotism, patience, and a genius for government which built up the empire. But prosperity led to luxury, self-exaggeration, and enervating vices. Society was steeped in sensuality, frivolity, and selfishness. The empire was rotten to the core, and must become the prey of barbarians, who had courage and vitality. Three centuries earlier, the empire might have withstood the shock of external enemies, and the barbarians might have been annihilated. But they invaded ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... little bit of Loch Grannoch gleaming through the trees, and the farm of Nether Crae set on the hillside high above it. He counted the sheep on the green field over the loch, numbering the lambs twice because they frisked irresponsibly about, being full of frivolity and having no opinions upon Luther ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... of the business is tremendous; and to ignore the fine shades in the 106 receipts for mead and metheglin would have been a frivolity unknown in Digby's circle. There is care; there is conscience; there is rivalry. The ingredients are mingled with a nice discrimination between the rights of the palate and the maintenance of health. "Use only Morello cherries (I think) for pleasure, and black ones for health." ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... irony was unnoticed, and once more she laughed. To tell the truth, if anybody could associate such a frivolity with Miss ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the latter yawned beside him now and he thrilled to its attractions. Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity. It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed, while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as birds. Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... us an amusing story of her little son. The child was sometimes in the drawing-room when his mother was receiving, and heard her and all her friends inveighing against the iniquities of the Imperial Court and the frivolity of the Empress. He saw the Empress walking one day in the Bois de Boulogne. She was attracted by the group of children, stopped and talked to them. The boy was delighted and said to his governess: "Elle est bien jolie, l'Imperatrice, ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... just the same, and now I'm going back to that wagon to finish my cure. I fancy that we'll now have a rest of six or eight hours, if General Jackson doesn't think so much time taken from war a mere frivolity." ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler |
