"Grandiose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was either yes or no with them. I thought it might work the other way; it might just as well mean that the ancestors did not know their own minds, and that first it was yes and then it was no with them. The Duke, in a truly grandiose manner, lays no restriction on the public, but throws his whole palace open every first and fifteenth of the month, and allows people to roam at their pleasure through all the rooms; they can even sit on the blue brocade furniture if they like, and there is no officious ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... get it in any library: those in search of sheer romantic adventure can purchase plenty of it at any book-stall. But the majority want something different from either of these. They want, first of all, to know what the country is like-not in vague and grandiose "word paintings," nor in strange and foreign sounding words and phrases, but in comparison with something they know. What is it nearest like-Arizona? Surrey? Upper New York? Canada? Mexico? Or is it totally different from anything, as is ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... his mind, Phil had been conscious of that, but it had seemed an insignificant threat against the excitement arising from the grandiose impudence of the plan, the perhaps rather small-boyish delight at being able to put something over, profitably, on the greatest power of all. Even now it might have been only a natural wariness that brought the threat up for a final moment of reflection. He didn't, of course, want to incur Earth ...
— Watch the Sky • James H. Schmitz
... melancholy landscape, the vast, desolate plain that stretches from Nanterre to Saint-Cloud, broken only by an occasional clump of trees or the smoke from some factory chimney. Perhaps, too, in a measure, to the disproportion between the humble hamlet of Judaea and that grandiose structure, that villa in the style of Louis XIII., built of small stones and mortar, and showing pink through the leafless branches of the park, where there were several large ponds with a coating of green slime. Certain it is that on passing ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... regulated beforehand, the same as by a ballet-manager. To any truth-loving person all this must seem like a charade performed by puppets.—But the festival is colossal, well calculated to stimulate the imagination and excite pride through physical excitement.[1139] On this grandiose stage the delegates become quite intoxicated with their part; for, evidently, theirs is the leading part; they represent twenty-six millions of Frenchmen, and the sole object of this ceremony is to glorify the national ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... far away. There are grassy plains that seem to roll into the sun, and there are great herds of game, and warlike Indians, and beyond the range of any vision there are vast mountains white with snow. Gold, too, may be there. It is a country enormous, grandiose, rich, and silent,—a desert waiting dumbly for the strong man's tread." He turned a little and drew another line. "To this side, away, away to the east, here where you and I are sitting, watching, watching, here are the Old Thirteen,—the Thirteen that the English took from the Indians, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln. They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster. And this idea was not confined to any one locality. Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this view. It was ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... patients. He continued to be very suspicious; frequently spoke of being doped and poisoned. Refused to take medicine, and at times refused to take nourishment because he believed it to be doped. A stenogram of February 10, 1907, shows him to have acquired some grandiose ideas and to be still disoriented to a large extent. Some of his replies were absolutely unreliable. For instance, when asked how long he had been here he replied: "If I came on March 25th, I have been here for three hundred and sixty-five thousand days. It is reasonable ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Parthenon marbles he was immensely impressed; but that which struck him most strongly was not the ideality, for which they have since become proverbial, but the wonderful naturalism of much of their detail in contrast to the grandiose conventions of his contemporaries. The fourth stage in our knowledge of Greek sculpture comes from the very fruitful excavations on Greek soil, especially at Athens, Olympia, and Delphi, which have shown us how widely varied is the range of the ancient sculptors, how many ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... in the late Mathew Moze's study, fascinated—as much unconsciously as consciously—by the thing which since its owner's death had grown every hour more mysterious and more formidable—the safe. It was a fine afternoon. The secondary but still grandiose enigma of the affair, Mr. Cowl, could be heard walking methodically on the gravel in the garden. Mr. Cowl was the secretary of the National ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... never find him sneering at Platonic love. Klopstock, soul of ethereal softness and sanctity; Jean Paul, who added the finest heart of womanhood to the athletic soul of manhood; Richardson, so blameless in his life, so pathetic in his writings, so pleasing in his half naive, half grandiose, personality; William Humboldt, the loving son and brother, the irreproachable statesman, the majestic scholar, the model of a Christian gentleman; Matthieu de Montmorency, hero and saint; Schleiermacher, the unflinching thinker and prophet, devout rouser, yearning comrade, encircled by ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... owed their splendor; to that the long ages through which they lived and flourished; to sacrifice, as the very basis of the national and religious polity, they owed the vigor, the young vigor, of humanity. Their literature was grandiose; their architecture magnificent; their art sublime. The traces of divinity ran through the whole of it. But, beautiful as it was, it would not have been well that it should have lasted, for had it been so, mankind would have grown to depend too much upon the manifested ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... of posterity. Among other sayings—I am quoting from memory—I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to nothing ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first century, had not the grandiose taste for ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... long generations been an energetic race. Whatever their defects, they had exhibited shrewdness and vigour. The late Marquess (grandfather to the present) had been perhaps the ablest (that is, done most for the House of Vipont) of them all. Of a grandiose and superb mode of living; of a majestic deportment; of princely manners; of a remarkable talent for the management of all business, whether private or public; a perfect enthusiast for the House of Vipont, and aided by a marchioness ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the third. The characters of the ode are colossi—Adam, Cain, Noah; those of the epic are giants—Achilles, Atreus, Orestes; those of the drama are men—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello. The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... nobility and grace of the landscape. And yet there was a difference in the appreciation of the two. More widely read and traveled, Evelyn's imagination took a wider range of comparison and of admiration, she was appealed to by the large features and the grandiose effects; while Alice noted more the tenderer aspects, the wayside flowers and bushes, the exotic-looking plants, which she longed to domesticate in what might be called the Sunday garden on the terraces in front of her house. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in Michael Angelo's style. There are a few somewhat distorted figures, Haman, the knot of men and women adoring the snake, Jonas, as he flings himself backwards, but except these, what calm, what grandiose perfection! And which was still more remarkable, what imposing charm! Eve, in the picture of "The Fall," is perhaps the most adorable figure that Art has ever produced; her beauty, in the picture on the left, was like a revelation of what humanity ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... clear—but that is enough if one has bound oneself to that strange idol and learnt the magic phrase on His Pedestal, [Greek: ARISTON MEN TI], for of all the illusions and dreams men cherish none is so grandiose as the illusion of conscious ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... enough to risk his all in its acquisition. It was in accordance with human nature and the principles of political economy that this unknown extent of uninhabited transmontane land, widely renowned for beauty, richness, and fertility, should excite grandiose dreams in the minds of English and Colonials alike. England was said to be "New Land mad and everybody there has his eye fixed on this country." Groups of wealthy or well-to-do individuals organized themselves into land companies for the colonization and exploitation of the West. The pioneer ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... conscience. The angel with the book of life and death can announce no sentence which has not already been pronounced by the very being to which it refers. The execution of the whole is spoken of as sublime and grandiose. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... military guard on the Ile Royale, when in the course of my travels I reached Cayenne. I believe the story to be in the main true. It is the sort of story that no man, I think, would ever invent about himself, for it is neither grandiose nor flattering, nor yet funny enough to gratify ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... of it in darkness, and crowded with dim forms of iron and brick—at one end, and one side, openings, where the June day came through. Within—a grandiose mingling of fire and shadow—a vast glare of white or bluish flame from a huge furnace roaring against the inner wall of the shed—sparks, like star showers, whirling through dark spaces—ingots of glowing steel, pillars of pure fire passing and repassing, so that the heat of them ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an electrical interpretation to the phenomena of matter and motion, and thus merge mechanics itself in electricity. One thus sees dawning afresh the eternal hope of co-ordinating all natural phenomena in one grandiose and imposing synthesis. Whatever may be the fate reserved for such attempts, they deserve attention in the highest degree; and it is desirable to examine them carefully if we wish to have an exact idea of the tendencies ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... that used to haunt him. For he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known—beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... temporal atellitosis, data of the late W. L. Worcester); X, delusion of birth to superior station, possibly the object of mixed emotions, probably not pleasant; and XI, manic-depressive exaltation with grandiose utterances, long prior to death (if there had been lung tuberculosis at the basis of the ileac ulcers, it ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious with ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... sleeplessness or alcohol; it is engulfed in the depths of empty stomachs, dispersed in the shops as they are opened, and the dark courts, or even to the fireless attics. That is the reason why there remains so little of it out of doors. But in that spacious and grandiose region of Paris, which was inhabited by Jenkins's clients, on those wide boulevards planted with trees, and those deserted quays, the fog hovered without a stain, like so many sheets, with waverings and cotton wool-like flakes. The effect was of a place inclosed, secret, almost ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... husband's actions Henriette had foreseen the criticisms that would rise in my mind as soon as I saw the servile effects of a courtier's life upon him. Monsieur de Mortsauf, king in his own castle and surrounded by an historic halo, had, to my eyes, a certain grandiose dignity. I was therefore greatly astonished at the distance he placed between the duchess and himself by manners that were nothing less than obsequious. A slave has his pride and will only serve the greatest despots. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... deep-blue sky appears, with beautiful small cumulus clouds suspended in the atmosphere. With the exception, perhaps, of a large blue kingfisher sitting in solitary state on a branch extending over the water, or a distant hornbill with its cheerful grandiose laugh, there are no evidences of animal life, nevertheless the exquisite scenery seems to lure the beholder on and on. To pass through this superb and silent realm was like a pleasant dream. There are no mosquitoes and consequently ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... she's alone in the house," the cook had said, with a grandiosity of style borrowed from the Family Herald. It is easy for the cook to be grandiose when the butler and the lady's- maid are in trouble. Thus philosophy walketh in ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... slopes, or of the beautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetian plain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in the play of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetian art. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose scenery of his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities for studying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve and back, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... street, Mr. Bernard had noticed a large house of some pretensions to architectural display, namely, unnecessarily projecting eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect, wooden mouldings at various available points, and a grandiose arched portico. It looked a little swaggering by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses that were not far from it, was painted too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too fanciful a fence before it, and had some fruit-trees planted in the front-yard, which to this fastidious young gentleman ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the royal tomb favored nobles received permission to build their own tombs, similarly equipped but on a smaller, less grandiose scale than that of the pharaoh. By this means the courtiers who had attended the pharaoh in his life-time would be at hand to perform similar services in ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... of Bluebeard stands out in these passages—Bluebeard, morbid, erotic, megalophonous megalomaniac, with his grandiose air and outlandish accoutrements! ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the preceding; born in 1793; subordinate in the mayor's office at Alencon in charge of registry. A sort of poet, liberal in politics and filled with ambition; weary of poverty and overflowing with grandiose sentiments. In 1816 he loved, with a passion that his commonsense combated, Mme. du Bousquier, then Mlle. Cormon, his senior by more than seventeen years. In 1816 the marriage dreaded by him took place. He could not brook the blow and drowned himself in the Sarthe. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... more often ten to fifteen years after infection, and as a rule in persons who think they have been completely cured. Both these diseases are fatal. Before causing death, locomotor ataxy causes intolerable pain for several years. General paralysis first gives rise to grandiose ideas, and after disintegrating the human personality bit by bit, ends by transforming the individual into a being much inferior to animals, and of an aspect as miserable as it is repulsive. A general paralytic in his last stage is little more than ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... this lonely woman after so many years of hard working, and hard living, my Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards! What is it that we call it in our grandiose speeches? British independence, rather perverted? Is that, or something like it, the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Ivanitch ordered us to kneel in the corner with our faces to the wall, the punishment consisted merely in the bodily discomfort of the position, whereas St. Jerome, in such cases, always assumed a haughty air, made a grandiose gesture with his hand, and exclaiming in a pseudo-tragic tone, "A genoux, mauvais sujet!" ordered us to kneel with our faces towards him, and to crave his pardon. ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... concretely with the passions, it found itself impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"—so strangely overpraised by Thackeray—with their metallic clank and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... does nothing of the sort. This is how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or Ernest Poole would have written "The Age of Innocence." They would have been grandiose, epical; their stories would have been histories of culture. It would have been as easy to have called their books broad as it is to call Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Tendencies, philosophies, irrepressible ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... degenerate form of the Valhalla theme repeated again and again, and the full effect of the device is only felt when, with the change of scene, we hear the passage in all its nobility and splendour. Wotan's greeting to his new castle is rather grandiose than really fine: one feels the theatrical baritone; one feels also that the quality of homeliness which makes Sachs a great character is sadly lacking. In the Valkyrie this unpretentiousness, so to speak, is always present, and the music gains proportionately in impressiveness. Wotan's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... lemon-colored light and smiled wanly at the next house, as Edith's grandiose phrase came to mind, "the old Vertrees country mansion." It stood in a broad lawn which was separated from the Sheridans' by a young hedge; and it was a big, square, plain old box of a house with a giant salt-cellar atop for a cupola. Paint ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... masculinity by its weight and size. It is squarely made, straight (classic) in line, equally balanced, heavily ponderous and magnificent. Over its surface, masses of decoration immobile as stone carving, are evenly dispersed, and contribute a grandiose ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... fortunes for one year of this fine fellow's youth spent at Paris? Peste! what love-letters we should have, with no need to buy them by billets de banque!" Thus he ran on, much to Alain's confusion, till dinner was announced. Then there was something grandiose in the frank bourgeois style wherewith he expanded his napkin and twisted one end into his waistcoat; it was so manly a renunciation of the fashions which a man so repandu in all circles might be supposed ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... encumbered with trunks and parcels, leaving the scene of her struggles and her defeat, whither she had once come as slim as a wand, to return stout and heavy, and heavy-hearted, to her childhood; content to live with her grandiose sister until such time as she should be ready for burial! The grimy and impassive old house perhaps heard her heart saying: "Only yesterday they were little girls, ever so tiny, and now—" The driving-off of a waggonette can ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... national boundaries, and to destroy all religions other than Judaism. This, it is alleged, is the concrete form in which the Jews visualize their destiny as the Chosen People. In order to attain this grandiose ideal, every means to weaken the non-Jewish elements and institutions in civilization is encouraged by the invisible Jewish government, the leaders of this ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... distinct characters. Some Father of the Church has said: "I feel there are two men in me." He would have spoken truly in saying this about Tartarin, who carried in his frame the soul of Don Quixote, the same chivalric impulses, heroic ideal, and crankiness for the grandiose and romantic; but, worse is the luck! he had not the body of the celebrated hidalgo, that thin and meagre apology for a body, on which material life failed to take a hold; one that could get through twenty ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... immense distance from the home country had exhausted their resources and involved the company in debt. The building of Mauritsstad and the carrying out of Joan Maurice's ambitious schemes for the administration and organisation of a great Brazilian dominion were grandiose, but very costly. The governor, moreover, who could brook neither incompetence nor interference on the part of his subordinates, had aroused the enmity of some of them, notably of a certain Colonel Architofsky, who through spite plotted and intrigued ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... the building of a new road to the distance of 750 versts; but mainly, the fever of building which seized the whole town, all the banks and financial institutions, and all the houseowners. Factories for making brick sprang up on the outskirts of the town like mushrooms. A grandiose agricultural exposition opened. Two new steamer lines came into being, and they, together with the previously established ones, frenziedly competed with each other, transporting freight and pilgrims. In competition they ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... search of exhilaration and beauty, Alsace offers attractions innumerable, sites grandiose and idyllic, picturesque ruins, superb forests, old churches of rare interest and many a splendid ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... are a surpassing record. Prolonged study of the human form had given to him, as to Michelangelo, a wonderful power of drawing groups of figures. His mere output was marvellous, and much of it on a grandiose scale. He covered hundreds of square feet of ceilings and walls in Venice with paintings of subjects that had been painted hundreds of times before; but each as he treated it was a new thing. Centuries of tradition governed the arrangement of ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... it presents an unfavourable contrast to French Imperialism, under which all the oversea colonies are represented in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. In the English plan the oversea colonies are unrelated atoms. You may say that they afford all the materials for a grandiose federation; but if you have flour in one bag, and raisins in another, and candied peel in another, and suet in another you must not call them a Christmas pudding until they have been mixed together and cooked. Those areas of the globe, ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... and her leisure hours of weaving, with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry which were produced from the early Christian centuries to the time of the Crusades, and thus will we approach more ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... course, though the fact that the horse ambles need not be considered an error. But the relative proportions of the horse and rider are not quite accurately preserved, Gattamelata being, if anything, rather below the right scale. The monument is, however, so massive and grandiose that criticism seems out of place; indeed, in the presence of the statue one feels that everything is subordinated to the power and mastery of Gattamelata himself. The general is bareheaded, and the strong ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... and Tancred," says he, in his grandiose way, "form a real Trilogy." "The derivation and character of political parties,"—he goes on to explain—"was the subject of Coningsby." "The condition of the people which had been the consequence of them"—was the subject of Sybil. "The duties of the Church ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... early magnates had died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive, either for themselves or through their children, that the road to social consideration now ran another way. In due course a congeries of bulky and grandiose edifices, built lavishly in the best taste of their own day, remained to stare vacantly at the infrequent passer-by, or to tremble before the imminent prospect of sinking to unworthy uses: odd, old-time megatheriums stranded ineptly in their mortgage-mud. But through the seventies the neighborhood ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the grandiose name of "German Ocean." And through the wide windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the feast ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... developed power and individuality. Posterity may well be grateful that the portraits of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were painted with fidelity to nature as Stuart saw it, rather than in the grandiose manner of West. Two other names, Malbone and Allston, deserve brief mention. The one achieved some distinction as a painter of miniatures; the other is remembered both as artist and man of letters in the literary circle which was forming about Boston. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... upon to decide and to overcome even more difficult problems than the foregoing, and by what colossal forces the levers of his far-flung tale are moved, and how eventually the horizon will become extended until everything assumes a grandiose and a lyrical tendency. Yes, many a verst of road remains to be travelled by a party made up of an elderly gentleman, a britchka of the kind affected by bachelors, a valet named Petrushka, a coachman ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... plus triste, le plus incommode et le plus disgracieux, que la mode ait jamais invente, c'est surtout au milieu des champs que tous ses inconvenients et toutes ses laideurs revoltent.... Au milieu de ce cadre austere et grandiose, qui transporte l'imagination au temps de la poesie primitive, apparaisse cette mouche parasite, le monsieur aux habits noirs, au menton rase, aux mains gantees, aux jambes maladroites, et ce roi de la societe n'est plus qu'un accident ridicule, une tache importune dans ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... audience remembered that it was at the play, and that the Prince had come to see the play. It sat down reluctantly, saving itself for his departure, watching him as he entered into enjoyment of the brave and grandiose ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... them ended. They were in a huge open space that must once have been a park in the center of the city. There were structures which could not possibly be other than government buildings. But the population of this world was small. They were not grandiose. There were walkways and some temporary buildings obviously thrown hastily together to house a sudden influx ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... restaurants—imitations of those in Paris, but on a much larger scale. The women who in Paris might be counted by the dozens appeared here in hundreds. The scandalous drunkenness here never came by chance, but always by design as an indispensable part of the gaiety. All was grandiose, glittering, colossal. The libertines diverted themselves in platoons, the public got drunk in companies, the harlots presented themselves in regiments. He felt a sensation of disgust before these timid and servile ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... quantity, it is also the incomprehensible, that which escapes the understanding and that which troubles it, which can serve to give us an idea of the super-sensuous infinity. As soon as this element attains the grandiose and announces itself to us as the work of nature (for otherwise it is only despicable), it then aids the soul to represent to itself the ideal, and imprints upon it a noble development. Who does not love the eloquent disorder of natural scenery to the insipid regularity ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the froward arrogant boy, a law to himself even in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to my questions, he came round to his grandiose plans again. He grew enthusiastic. He talked so eloquently of the possibility of capturing a fighting-machine that I more than half believed in him again. But now that I was beginning to understand something ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... few yards to the settlement. A 'Steam-launch' sounds grandiose, and so does a 'Great Central Depot'—seen on paper. And touching this place I was told a tale. Some time ago two young French employes, a doctor and an engineer, were sent up to the mines, and fell victims to the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... whether he intended to remain there long or not, the fact was that he did not go away. Doubtless he grew tired of the life at the hotel, for one day he suddenly bought a fine house and established himself in it like a prince. This edifice, venerable from its antiquity, had the grandiose aspect of a palace, and one of its angles ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... for his unfortunate coquetting a year ago with the leaders of the now fallen Anfu Club. He allowed himself to be deceived into thinking that they were ready to turn against the Japanese if he would give them his support; and his nationalist imagination was inflamed by the grandiose schemes of little Hsu for ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... liberality. The whole argument tended to impress upon the House of Commons the maxim that in a free country, above all others, it is absolutely necessary to have the heir-apparent of the crown bred up in a state of grandeur and independency. Despite the high-flown sentiments and the grandiose historical illustrations in which the speaker indulged, there seems to the modern intelligence an inherent meanness, a savor of downright vulgarity, through the whole of it. If you give a prince only fifty thousand a year, you can't expect anything of him. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... bedroom was the State chamber, which had been occupied by kings and queens in days of yore. That grandiose four-poster, with the carved ebony columns, cut velvet curtains, and plumes of ostrich feathers, had been built for Elizabeth, when she deigned to include Rood Hall in one of her royal progresses. Charles the First had rested his weary head upon those very pillows, before he went on ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the author of a well-known mediaeval treatise on composition in various poetical styles of which he gave examples. Chaucer's irony is therefore directed against some grandiose and affected lines on the death of Richard I., intended to illustrate the pathetic style, in which Friday is addressed as "O Veneris lachrymosa dies" ("O tearful day ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... This is the grandiose scheme. It is no mere fanciful picture, but based on the writings of great German publicists, professors, and high colonial authorities, and chapter and verse could be quoted in full detail for every feature of the scheme. The civilization of the African natives ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... of the past and of the present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... dirty and ruined place, that was once so splendid, with a regret that modern Italy, which is so eager to build grandiose banks and every sort of public building, is yet so regardless of old things that one might fancy her history only began in 1860. Mr. Le Mesurier, in the interesting book already referred to, has suggested that this old palace, so full of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... things in general, the Prince conducts us to Napoleon in particular, and enters largely into a discussion of the merits of the imperial system. Our author speaks of the Emperor's advent in the following grandiose way:— ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this point feudalism in Japan was finer and more sensitive, if it was less grandiose, than feudalism in Europe. There is nothing in Japan to compare with the churches and cathedrals of the West, for there is no stone architecture at all. But there is nothing in the West to compare with ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... with this, a simulation of the military is a favorite device. So we find Pseudolus addressing the audience in ringing blustering tones and with grandiose gesture ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... by the sentry; then the curtain was drawn aside, and Basil found himself in the triclinium of the Flavian palace, now used by the Greek general as his public reception room. Its size was not much less than that of the hall of audience; its decoration in the same grandiose style. Enormous pillars of granite supported the roof; statues stood, or had stood, all around; the pavement, composed of serpentine, porphyry, and Numidian marble in many hues, was a superb work of art. But Basil saw only the human figures before him. In a chair covered with furs ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had only one, and it was not of the best. For years the English traveller abroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiose personality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage, fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures, scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him—as in the case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn down (it was ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... it, the operas which had seemed the most secure of popularity were soon consigned to oblivion. It is a significant fact that Donizetti's lighter works have stood the test of time more successfully than his more serious efforts. Though the grandiose airs and sham tragedy of 'Lucia' have long since ceased to impress us, we can still take pleasure in the unaffected gaiety of 'La Fille du Regiment' and 'Don Pasquale.' These and many similar works were written currente calamo, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Cornilliac that the extreme summit is over 5000 feet above the sea—perhaps 5200. [29] The clouds of the summit afford no indication to eyes accustomed to mountain scenery in northern countries; for in these hot moist latitudes clouds hang very low, even in fair weather. But in bulk Pele is grandiose: it spurs out across the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic: the great chains of mornes about it are merely counter-forts; the Piton Pierreux and the Piton Pain—Sucre (Sugar-loaf Peak), and other elevations varying from 800 ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... of mounting armaments between army and army, navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, of cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and the naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms and covered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There are no conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goals or values that justify these things. International diplomacy and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... place till full six months after the period to which our story has brought us. Baronets with twelve thousand a-year cannot be married off the hooks, as may be done with ordinary mortals. Settlements of a grandiose nature were required, and were duly concocted. Perhaps Mr. Die had something to say to them, so that the great maxim of the law was brought into play. Perhaps also, though of this Herbert heard no word, it was thought inexpedient to hurry matters while any further ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... what I can only describe as the atmosphere of Infancy,—and a touching atmosphere it is too—is strengthened by keeping all the figures small and heightening this suggestion by contrast with a grandiose architecture. In both, too, the sacred scenes reveal themselves like visions unseen by the Oberriedt family, who face outward toward the altar and are supposed to be lighted by the actual lights of the church. The whole work must once have been a glorious creation, with its ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... daintiness with a fair measure of dramatic feeling for the pose. A modicum of old Benjamin West's tendency to the grandiose would have done Abbey no harm; but if his imagination balked at the higher flights often attained by Gustave Dore, and sometimes by Elihu Vedder, yet there is a charm in his sobriety, there is something which compels ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... holding Elsa with her blond florescence in his arms. Then a certain contentment would possess him as he pictured her mother forced to stay home with blighted hankerings. What a ridiculous appearance he would have presented towing her around here in a waltz before all these florid and grandiose figures ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... grandiose performance, and has been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... spring and summer of 1836 the talk of internal improvements grew more general and more clamorous. The candidates for office spoke about little else, and the only point of emulation among the parties was which should be the more reckless and grandiose in its promises. When the time arrived for the assembling of the Legislature, the members were not left to their own zeal and the recollection of their campaign pledges, but meetings and conventions were everywhere held to spur them up to the fulfillment ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... other technical matters as to which his own knowledge was comparatively defective. He reserved to himself what may be called the "literary" aspect of his theme, recording the place of each animal in history, and relating its habits with such gusto as his ornate and grandiose style permitted. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... journey is now over. Soon a couple of cars creep quietly up. One by one the casualties are lifted in or climb in stiffly. The doctor who has come up with them chats with the M.O., and the local gossip is exchanged for the wider knowledge (or more grandiose rumours) of the field ambulance. Our Jock, who has a bullet in his chest, is lifted in. Straps are fastened securely and tarpaulins tied. 'All aboard, sir!' 'Right! Well, so long, Hadley!' 'Cheero, Scott!' The ambulances start ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... babbling moods, in which he would have talked the head off any man who was not born in a country laved by the childish Mediterranean. Coleman could not understand what he said to the soldiers as they passed, but it was evidently all grandiose nonsense. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... standing high among the world's great madmen. I mean Jan Bockelson, the Anabaptist, known as Jan of Leyden, who, beginning as pure enthusiast, succumbed, as so many a leader of women has done, to the intoxication of authority, and became the slave of grandiose ambition and excesses. Every country has had its mock Messiahs: they rise periodically in England, not less at the present day than in the darker ages (hysteria being more powerful than light); yet the history of none of these spiritual monarchs can compare with ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... impersonal ecstasy. Amiel writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... plentiful spending fund. He had told her they would go North from Reno and travel eastward by the Canadian Pacific, stopping at points of interest along the road. He imagined his courtship progressing in grandiose suites of rooms wherein were served delicate meals, his generous largesse to obsequious hirelings adding to her dazzled approval. He had to have that money; he couldn't go without it; he had set it aside to ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a general statement, hardly anything could seem more grandiose, or fitter to revive in the breasts of men the memory of great dispensations by which new strata had been laid in the history of mankind. And there was a very widely spread conviction that the advent of the French king and his army into Italy was one of those events at which ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Nevertheless we can distinguish in a general way between the old skeleton of the story, in which the theme is treated in simple epic fashion, society is far freer than in later days and no one objects to eating beef, from the additional matter, in which the tale is recast in a far more grandiose vein and is padded out with enormous quantities of moral, religious, and philosophic sermons. The religion too is different in the different parts. In the older portions the gods who are most popular are Indra, Agni, and Brahma—not ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on its ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... striking fact, the better will he be able to realise the depth of the solitude in which we now found ourselves. While the boys slung the beds, and Tom busied himself with dinner, we sat and smoked, and savoured together our satisfaction in our complete and grandiose isolation. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... for the American campaign was spacious, not to say grandiose. A line of strong French posts, ranging from Duquesne, on the Ohio, to Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, held the English settlements on the coast girdled, as in an iron band, from all extension westward; while Quebec, perched in almost impregnable strength on the frowning cliffs which ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... where the picture is not set in a frame of hideous houses, awakened her native enthusiasm. "A grandiose ruin," she exclaims, "of colossal proportions; it is shut away, isolated, silent and respected. There you feel the terrific power of the Caesars, and the opulence of a nation intoxicated with its ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... forest divining the track of his enemy from a displaced leaf or twig; the Zealots of Jehovah urging a last frenzied defence of Jehovah's Sanctuary against the Roman host; and now, last of all, the gloom and flames, the infernal palaces, the towering fiends, the grandiose and lumbering war of 'Paradise Lost': these things, together with the names and suggestions of 'Lias's talk—that whole crew of shining, fighting, haranguing men and women whom the old dreamer was for ever bringing into weird action on the moorside—lived ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... movement of Tschaikowsky's "Pathtique" symphony, but becomes more and more transfigured in its passionate loveliness when it aids the beatification of the more than ghoulish princess. There is no escape from the power of the music when it soars to grandiose heights in the duet between Salome 'and the prophet, the subsequent intermezzo and the wicked apotheosis. It overwhelms the senses and reduces the nervous system of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that Esarhaddon left marks of his magnificence. The palace called the South-western Palace, in consequence of its position in the mound, was commenced by him. It was never finished, but in plan it was more grandiose than any other of the royal dwellings. Had it been complete it would have included the largest hall ever provided by an Assyrian architect for the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the courage to take upon themselves the responsibility of the decisive "Yes." Finally the Count seized the bull by the horns. Adopting his most grandiose air, he turned with a bow to the embarrassed young woman and said, "We accept your offer with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... few years the Rockefeller houses—he rapidly organized three, one after another—competed with a large number of other units in the oil business on somewhat more than even terms. At this time Rockefeller was merely one of a large number of successful oil refiners, yet during these early days a grandiose scheme was taking shape in that quiet, insinuating, far-reaching brain. He said nothing about it, even to his closest associates, yet it filled his every waking hour. For this young man was taking a comprehensive ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... Louis, had a common grievance with Edward and his mother against Charles of Anjou. She hated him the more inasmuch as he was depriving her of all influence over her son, King Philip. It was easy in such circumstances for the two widowed queens of France and England to form grandiose schemes for ousting Charles from Provence. Rudolf lent himself to their plans by investing Margaret with the county. Edward's filial piety and political interests made him a willing partner in these designs. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... possessions and privileges, but also in dress and air, founded upon strict distinctions in law. The landed aristocrat with his laces and ruffles, his silks and his gold and silver ornaments and his expensive tableware, his consciously superior air and tone of grandiose authority, was far removed in established position from the mechanic or the laborer with his coarse clothes and mean habitation. Laws were long in force in various provinces which prohibited the common people from wearing gold and ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... the white stone stairway, rather a grandiose construction for a little industrial town. It divided itself into doubling curving flights at the first landing, and its walls were covered with pictures and designs. The museum itself, a series of three communicating rooms, was about as large as ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Indies, and everywhere else in the world. This was to control its people "just as the Pope and the Catholic Church control its millions in every land." The related ideas and activities were sometimes termed grandiose and they awakened much opposition on the part of the old leaders, the clergy, while conservative business stood aloof. At the same time the conception is one that deserves to be considered ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... our happy constitution as it was established at the glorious and necessary revolution". Brave words which, as there is reason to believe, were invented for him and never spoken.[86] Beckford's friends believed that he had got the better of the king, and Chatham in a grandiose letter to him declared that "the spirit of old England spoke that never-to-be-forgotten day". Nevertheless, Beckford's conduct was highly indecorous. The sovereign never performs a public act on his own responsibility, and accordingly all addresses ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... huge, bulky, massive, immense, gross, voluminous, capacious, extensive; pregnant; arrogant, overbearing, lordly, magisterial, pompous; bombastic, grandiose, grandiloquent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Country under such a Czarina. Which proved to be the whole rule of his policy on that Russian side. "Good that Country cannot bring me by any quarrel with it; evil it can, to a frightful extent, in case of my quarrelling with others! Be wary, be punctual, magnanimously polite, with that grandiose Czarina and her huge territories and notions:" this was Friedrich's constant rule in public and in private. Nor is it thought his CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE EMPRESS CATHARINE, when future generations see it in print, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... surety of an eventual peace. We have seen the German War Lord flitting hungrily from Lorraine to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe, prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the strongest of all, and probably had most to do in making Northern sentiment. Southern gentlemen were popular in the North. They spent money lavishly. Their manners were grandiose. They talked boastfully of the number of their "niggers," and told how they were accustomed to ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... suddenly landed in a place so different from that in which moved my old Breton priests, who, with their venerable heads all wood or granite, remind one of the Osirian colossi which in after life so struck my fancy when I saw them in Egypt, grandiose in their long lines of immemorial calm. My coming to Paris marked the passage from one religion to another. There was as much difference between Christianity as I left it in Brittany and that which I found current in Paris, as there is between a piece of old ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... naturalism. Such a school, the creation of an alien Muslim dynasty, would at first sight seem unlikely to produce illustrations of Hindu religion. Its main function was to illustrate works of literature, science and contemporary history—a function which resulted in such grandiose productions as the Akbarnama or Annals of Akbar, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.[74] None the less there are two ways in which Mughal painting, as developed under Akbar, contributed to the Krishna ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer |
