"Irreverence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moments of her life, who was genial and gay, who enjoyed laughter and was always at home with humanity, knew very well how to be silent. There was a saying she cared for, "God speaks to man in the silence;" perhaps she felt there was a suspicion of irreverence in talking to any one, even to Dion, about her aspiration to God. If, on his return home, he asked her how she had passed the day, she often said only, "I've been very happy." Then he said to himself, "What more can I want? I'm ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... father and D'ri made the coffin of planed lumber, and lined it with deerskin, and dug the grave on top of a high hill. When all was ready, my father, who had always been much given to profanity, albeit I know he was a kindly and honest man with no irreverence in his ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... up with an impossible combination of qualities, blending the enthusiasm of modern research with a spirit of expansive teleology. Whilst Buckland was still of boyish years, the father treated with bantering good-humour such outbreaks of irreverence as came immediately under his notice, weakly abstaining from any attempt at direct argument or influence. But, at a later time, there took place serious and painful discussions, and only when the young man had rubbed off his edges in the world's highways ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... that in her sexual enjoyment is out of place, improper, scandalous. To arouse sexual emotions in a woman, if not to profane a sacred host, is, at all events, the staining of an immaculate peplos; if not sacrilege, it is, at least, irreverence or impertinence. For all men, the chaster a woman is, the more agreeable it is to bring her to the orgasm. That is felt as a triumph of the body over the soul, of sin over virtue, of earth over ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... theory which made the earth more than six thousand years old, and was afraid that the public taste would not approve of the allusions to free-masonry and Soyer's soup. . . . And worse than that, one and all—Jew, Turk, infidel, and heretic, as well as the orthodox—joined in pious horror at his irreverence;—the shocking way he had of jumbling religion and politics—the human and the divine—the theories of the pulpit with the facts of the exchange. . . . The very atheists, who laughed at him for believing in a God, agreed that that, at least, was inconsistent with the dignity of the God—who ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... had much in common—although the one was full of saintly fire and the other, at times, of defiant irreverence. It was Pierce whose visits Toombs most enjoyed at his own home, with whom he afterward talked of God and religion. The good bishop lived to bury the devoted Christian wife of the Georgia statesman, and finally, when the dross of worldliness was gone, to receive ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... those who were previously aware of these high qualities,—and who, seeing in a book to which they had looked for a lasting monument to your fame, a degree of presumptuousness, irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many points, which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... before she had time to realize even that she was vilely parodying one of her most precious texts, and that the irreverence was ghastly. ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... with this elemental control and moderation, I found the character and manners of the people gentler and sweeter than I had been led to believe they were. No loudness, brazenness, impertinence; no oaths, no swaggering, no leering at women, no irreverence, no flippancy, no bullying, no insolence of porters or clerks or conductors, no importunity of bootblacks or newsboys, no omnivorousness, of hackmen,—at least, comparatively none,—all of which an American is apt to notice, and, I hope, appreciate. In London the bootblack salutes you with a respectful ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... entreat the Emperor's pardon. All the time they were gone the city gave itself up to prayer and fasting, listening to sermons from the priest, John—called from his eloquence Chrysostom, or Golden Mouth—who preached repentance for all the most frequent sins, such as love of pleasure, irreverence at church, etc. The Bishop on his way met the Emperor's deputies who were charged to enquire into the crime and punish the people; and he redoubled his speed in reaching Constantinople, where he so pleaded the cause of ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... spirit in Ebenezer's utterances, and there was a thankful feeling in the kirk of the Townend that day. As they "skailed," some of the young folk went as far as to say that they hoped that desk would never be filled. But this expression of opinion was discouraged, for it was felt to border on irreverence. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... discoverable, save in a portrait or reminiscent paper conserved in the archives of the Historical Society. And in this speedy oblivion of domestic and social landmarks, how easily we find a reason for the national irreverence, and the exclusive interest in the future, which make the life of America, like the streets of her cities, a scene ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart, that brings Irreverence for ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Settle we have already spoken fully; but we may here add, that, in addition to former offences of a public and private nature, Elkanah, in the Prologue to the "Emperor of Morocco," acted in March 1681-2, had treated Dryden with great irreverence.[16] Shadwell had been for some time in good habits with Dryden; yet an early difference of taste and practice in comedy, not only existed between them, but was the subject of reciprocal debate, and something approaching ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... in the flood, making vain effort to clamber out, then whirling helplessly away—swept out of sight around the shoulder of bluff, and borne on down the tossing waves of the torrent. Men mean no irreverence when they call upon their Maker at such times, even in soldier oath. It is ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... negligence and selfish love of yourselves, and to offer humble and continual prayers, with many vigils, and with knowledge of yourselves, because the world is perishing through the crowding multitude of iniquities, and the irreverence shown to the sweet Bride of Christ. Well, then, let us give honour to God, and our toils to our neighbour. Ah, me, do not be willing, you or the other servants of God, that our life should end otherwise than in mourning and in sighs, for by no other ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... experience with them, these traits have been characteristic of those I have met. But it is not my lack of reverence that I intended to write about, it is the contradictory way in which those who are under their charge view this matter. The practical, effective and active irreverence of professing Christians astonishes as much as it puzzles me. They believe, or assume to believe, in the sacredness of the ministry and in the reverence due ministers as such; how do they show it? It seems to me that the architectural custom of elevating the pulpit above the heads ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... the hours for family worship. In the modern effort to emphasize the fact that God is love, the other fact that sin deserves and receives punishment has been thrown too far into the background, or is ignored altogether. Regular reading of the Bible has become as rare as it formerly was universal. Irreverence and skepticism in regard to its truths and teachings permeate a large portion of society, and the general influence of the social life of young people is opposed to the cultivation or expression ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... of my readers will be shocked at the seeming irreverence of my book, for that intimacy with the "Lord" was characteristic of the negroes. They believed implicitly in a Special Providence and direct punishment or reward, and that faith they religiously tried to impress upon their young charges, white or ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... been no word of reproach or direction he would whisper for her, who needed none, possessing all the wisdom of virtue, dear heart! but a warning in my uncle's behalf, as she would have it, against the bottle he served. The maid's whimsical fancy is not incomprehensible to me, neither tainted with irreverence nor untruth: 'twas a thing flowering in the eyrie garden of her days at Whisper Cove—a thing, as I cannot doubt, of ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... attempts to convey religious instruction, because he was not sufficiently acquainted with the language to know what ideas he might or might not be suggesting. That was wise, and yet how unlike many hot-headed men, who rush with unintentional irreverence into ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... From the eldest down to the youngest member they seem to have no stamina; they fall ill when all others are well, as if afflicted with a species of paralysis that affects body, mind, and moral sense at once. If the phrase may be used without irreverence, there is no health in them. The slightest difficulty is sufficient to send an apparently strong, hale man whining to the workhouse. He localises his complaint in his foot, or his arm, or his shoulder; but, in truth, he ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Haji with irreverence, and hold him a "lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence." But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain, who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others think and hide. With the author of "Supernatural ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... trodden by the feet of angels, had grasped a truth which on one side touched the divine, even though on the other it came perilously near to the grotesque. And He, Who taught them as by parables, never misunderstood—as did certain of His followers—their reverent irreverence; but, understanding it, saw ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... in Berlin. Earnest character of Roman Catholic worship in central Germany. The Russo-Greek Church as seen in Russia; beauty of its service; its unfortunate influence on the people. Roman Catholicism in Italy; its wretched condition when I first saw it; irreverence of prelates at an Easter high mass in st. Peter's. Pius IX; effectiveness of the ceremonial in which he took part; Lord Odo Russell's reminiscence of him. A low mass at Pisa and its effect. An effort at proselytism in Rome; Father Cataldi. Condition of Rome at that time. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... not more efficacious. But as that could not endure, at last the archbishop grew tired and laid aside the most holy sacrament. They returned it to the convent of St. Francis, whence it had been taken, with the same irreverence. The archbishop divested himself of the stole and cope, whereupon the infantry took him outside the city, and embarked him in a champan which was prepared at a port called St. Dominic. With an escort of an adjutant and twelve soldiers, he ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... himself over the ground, and making strange gutteral noises—Amber concluded to wait for the guide Naraini had promised him. He turned aside and seated himself upon the edge of a broken sandstone tomb. The silence was appalling and for relief he took refuge in cheap irreverence. "Home," he observed aloud, "never was ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Stop it. I will not have you add to your other misdeeds the crime of irreverence against one of the greatest and worthiest members of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... the contrary, we blush to admit it, Methuselah was held in very trifling esteem by his frivolous fellow-citizens, who habitually referred to him as an "old 'wayback," "a barnacle," an "old fogy," a "mossback," or a "garrulous dotard," and with singular irreverence they took delight in twitting him upon his senility and in pestering him with divers new-fangled notions altogether distasteful, not to say shocking, to ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... sure that it was Olivia Langdon's voice that gave the deciding vote for the newly adopted chief title, which would take any suggestion of irreverence out ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... intended no irreverence; indeed, he could not tell what he did intend, or what it was which ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... of Lyons—and sometimes not so much as see even a Lyons-waistcoat, but this remnant of antiquity would present itself to my fancy; and I have often said in my wild way of running on—tho' I fear with some irreverence—'I thought this shrine (neglected as it was) as valuable as that of Mecca, and so little short, except in wealth, of the Santa Casa itself, that some time or other, I would go a pilgrimage (though I had no other business at Lyons) on purpose ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... reviled, hated, rejected, denied,)—that the SPIRIT would not leave Himself without witness in this place. It was to have been anticipated, I say, that Eternal Wisdom would carefully—(I trust there is no irreverence in so speaking of GOD and His ways!)—would carefully make provision: meet the coming unbelief (as His Angel met Balaam) with a drawn sword: plant up and down throughout these Twelve Verses of the Gospel, sure indications ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... "Such irreverence shall not be!" exclaimed Ranulph, seizing Luke with one hand, and snatching at the cereclothes with the other. "Remove it, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... letters. Between two impending law-suits how shall we muster courage to keep on the even tenor of our way? Even our staunch friend, the anonymous Public, torments us with frequent accusatory epistles, charging us with dulness, impiety, and irreverence for American institutions. All these we must lay on the back of our Englishman, whose compatriots we confess are apt to assume a latitude of style hardly tolerated among us. In the mean time, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... story about the King was related, eagerly listened to, and commented on by Wikkey with such familiar realism as often startled Lawrence, and made him wonder whether he were allowing irreverence; but which at the same time, threw a wondrously vivid light on the histories which, known since childhood, had lost so much of their interest for himself: and certainly, as far awakening first ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM
... colleges who have no children, and therefore never feel the difficulties of supporting them. Heaven forbid that so humble an individual as myself should question their wisdom, or say anything about them that should seem to smack of irreverence; but I do believe that (with one or two exceptions I have in my mind) the system they have introduced among us is the Greatest Humbug in the universe. In the meantime poor Paterfamilias (who is the last man, they flatter themselves, to find ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow- student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any "greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences and in the quoted letters of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... study of the prevailing attitude towards sex and reproduction convinces one that back of the greatest sexual problems of our times is the almost universal secrecy, disrespect, vulgarity, and irreverence concerning every aspect of sex and reproduction. Even expectant motherhood is commonly concealed as long as possible, and all reference to the developing new life is usually accompanied with blushes and tones suggestive ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... when one hears irreverence poured forth from reverend lips? I do not mean merely irreverence for the Catholic Creeds; that to my mind-God forgive me if I misjudge him- seemed to me only one fruit of a deep root of irreverence for all things as they are, even for all ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... have betrayed the secret, but I have all the trouble in the world to get it into her head that authors are the most villainous of matches (in respect of fortune, be it understood). Really Laurentia is quite romantic. How she would hate me if she knew with what irreverence I allude ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... Florence in 1828, but in spite of the favor of the court, and the open rancor of the friends of the Classic School, it failed; at Turin, where the Adelchi was tried, Pellico regretted that the attempt to play it had been made, and deplored the "vile irreverence of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... 1) My lot be still to lead The life of innocence and fly Irreverence in word or deed, To follow still those laws ordained on high Whose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky No mortal birth they own, Olympus their progenitor alone: Ne'er shall they slumber in oblivion cold, The god in them is strong and grows ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... been written concerning Roumanian funerals. That they are showy, almost to irreverence, and that the exposure of the face of the corpse in its glazed coffin is repulsive, there can be no doubt, but they are not one whit worse than the lugubrious processions with their 'arrangements' in black and feathers which are still to ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... may not be a European change. Society may not be cast into the furnace, as it has been by those struggles, wars, and revolutions, which were essential to the working of the iron temperament of Europe. But Providence, if we may so speak without irreverence, evidently delights in the variety, multitude, and novelty of its highest expedients. If no two great portions of the physical world are like in form, climate, product, and even in the colouring of their skies, why are we to insist on uniformity in government, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... of formal and dignified character, not such as would be extemporized for the amusement of an irreverent company. Like all the formal hulas, it was tabu, by which the Hawaiians meant that it was a religious service, or so closely associated with the notion of worship as to make it an irreverence to trifle with it. For this reason as well as for its intrinsic dignity its performance was reserved for the most distinguished guests and the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings, and Indecency vomit her own nastiness ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... sign of reawakening courage in his followers; rather, indeed, of growing terror at the irreverence ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... if we think that a child is naturally alien to respect, basing this opinion on the very numerous examples of irreverence which he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets corrupted or lost. By ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... giggle like children at the entrance of the foreigner and never took their eyes off us. Later, individual monks came running round the shrines, beating a gong as though to call the attention of the deity, and shouting a few words of perfunctory praise or prayer. Irreverence more complete I have not seen even in Italy, nor beggary more shameless. Such is the latter end of the gospel of Buddha in China. It seems better that he should sit deserted in his Indian caves than be dishonoured by ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... bookmaker was original. He cavalierly waved aside all such confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet contemporaneous, incidentally referred to King Solomon's visits to Cleopatra, and with sad irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh's horses and chariots as "the big handicap." He did not mean to be irreverent or unhistorical. He merely wished to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he was very original, and quite clever at history. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dropped his "cousin" as though he had been shot, and, turning round, regarded the two young ladies for some minutes in silence, while Mrs. Russell sat rigid with horror at this shocking irreverence. But in the royal eye, as it rested on Katie, there was a merry twinkle, until at length the contagion seized upon "His Majesty" himself, and he too burst forth into peals of laughter. After this even Mrs. Russell joined in, and so it happened that the King and ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... and visible embodiments. From afar, you might trace the divine agency on its way. But to touch, to handle it, with these fleshly hands:—well! for Monseigneur, that was by no means to believe because the thing was "incredible, or absurd." He had smiled, not certainly from irreverence, nor (a prelate for half his life) in conscious incredulity, but only in mute surprise, at an administration of divine graces—this administration in which he was a high priest—in itself, to his quite ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... any real irreverence in answering thus: for of course it is not the Almighty who puts the questions, but someone audaciously personating Him. And some of us find this pretension irritating; as Douglas Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the pavement was moved to accost ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... grave of Lazarus, 'that we may die with Him.' 'He is going to His death, that I am sure of, and I am going to be beside Him even in His death.' A constitutional pessimist! The only other notice that we have of him is that he broke in—with apparent irreverence which was not real,—with a brusque contradiction of Christ's saying that they knew the way, and they knew His goal. 'Lord! we know not whither Thou goest'—there spoke pained love fronting the black prospect ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... flogged him for such irreverence, we are not told; nevertheless, the fact is suggestive of an element in the boy's make-up to which the ingenious skeptic may appeal with success. Possibly it was only the native humor of the boy, which, with his love of fun, cropped out on that ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" had been pronounced, Malling settled himself to listen. He felt tensely interested. Both Mr. Harding and Chichester were now before him, the one as performer—he used the word mentally, with no thought of irreverence—the other as audience. He could study both as he wished to study them ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... self-conscious; he is precocious; all the tricks and devices of civilization are known to him; all artifices and contrivances he sees in shop-windows; the street, the theatre, the newspaper are the rivals of the home, and they quickly teach him irreverence and disobedience. He loses innocence, experience of evil gives him flippant views. He becomes wise in his own conceit; having eyes only for the surfaces of things, he easily persuades himself that ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... sternly, 'if you were a professor, I should present you to the church for irreverence. As it is, I have done my duty';—and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... understand these people," he said to me, soon after his adventure with the "boys." "Such a compound of devotion and irreverence, meanness and generosity, cunning and child-like openness, was never seen. When I give Holy Communion with you, sir, on Sunday morning, my heart melts at the seraphic tenderness with which they approach the altar. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of irreverence ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... alone under the solid impenetrable shroud that enveloped him, and the senseless form he held on his breast. And if he tried to follow on by that clue which Armine had left him, whirlwinds of dismay seemed to sweep away all hope and trust, while he thought of wilfulness, recklessness, defiance, irreverence, and all the yet darker shades of a self- indulgent and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ironmonger patvendisto. Irony ironio. Irradiate radii. Irregular neregula. Irreligious malpia. Irreparable neriparebla. Irrepressible nehaltigebla. Irreproachable neriprocxinda. Irresolute sxanceligxa, nedecida. Irreverence malriverenco. Irritable incitebla. Irritate inciti. Is estas. Island insulo. Islander insulano. Isle insulo. Isolate izoli. Israelite Izraelido. Issue eldoni. Issue (offspring) idaro. Issue elflui. Isthmus terkolo. It gxi, gxin. Italian ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the cliffs gave more than a single glance at "Israel's Tabernacle," as, without the least irreverence, he had named his boat. But, using the same ports as the smugglers, he was often brought into close relations with them. They asked him for information which was freely given, as from one friend to another. They trusted him, for though often interrogated by the supervisor and riding officers, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... was to hang perfectly still while the outer hull of the ship pitched and rolled with the moving sea. It was a failure, but the theory was sound and looked practicable. At any rate, it is a parable of what may be in our lives. If I might venture, without seeming irreverence, to modernise and so to illustrate this command of our Lord's, I would say, that He here bids us do for our life's voyage across a stormy sea, exactly what the 'Bessemer' ship was an attempt to do in its region—so to poise and control the oscillations of the central ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Cardinal Bibbiena introduces an elaborate discussion of the different sorts of jokes, which proves the high value attached in Italy to all displays of wit. It appears that even practical jokes were not considered in bad taste, but that irreverence and grossness were tabooed as boorish. Mere obscenity is especially condemned, though it must be admitted that many jests approved of at that time would now appear intolerable. But the essential point to be aimed at then, as now, was the promotion of mirth by cleverness, and not by mere ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... all Rome resounded, on account of the prolonged strife with the Church of Constantinople, set himself down to discuss the same topics which they were wrangling over by the light—to him so clear and precious—of the Greek philosophy. There was perhaps in this employment neither reverence nor irreverence. He had not St. Augustine's intense and almost passionate conviction of the truth of Christianity; but he was quite willing to accept it and to discourse upon it, as he discoursed ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... which these persons temporarily and phenomenally obeyed. Since, then, the sensuous manifestation has now become merely symbolic, and is no longer an indispensable investiture of the idea, it may be altered at will in Christian art without irreverence. The utmost capacity of the artist is now exerted, not in enforcing or refining a generalised type, but in discovering some new facial expression which shall reveal psychological quality in a particular being. Doing so, he inevitably insists upon the face; and having formed ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... For perhaps we may say after Plato, and without irreverence, that the pattern of perfect cricket is laid up somewhere in the skies, and out of man's reach. But between it and ordinary cricket we may set up a copy of perfection, as close as man can make it, and, by little and little, closer every year. This copy will be preserved, and cared ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the gratification of a gorgeous spectacle, the joy of making a Sunday of a weekday, dominated every other feeling. As the procession passed along the boulevards, the spectators on the balconies almost applauded; here, in the populous quarters, irreverence manifested itself even more frankly. Coarse chaff, vulgar comments on the dead man and his doings, with which all Paris was familiar, laughter called forth by the broad-brimmed hats of the rabbis and the solemn ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... one young doctor has departed with his bride on a wedding tour to Texas, each upon a bicycle. Other strange affairs will no doubt take place. By and by the bishops will see no more irreverence in bidding Godspeed to girls starting on a journey to California upon bicycles than to girls departing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... peculiarities of Shakespeare when mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities" an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of Bolingbroke and Newton. A hundred phrases could be gathered from his correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds serious or extravagant utterance. Even in ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... against her zeal as an Irish Church-woman. It is true that she mentioned what she regarded as the disaster of Larry's religion in her prayers, but she did so without heat, leaving the matter, without irreverence, to the common sense of Larry's Creator, who, she felt must surely recognise the disadvantages of the position as ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... and given her a pair of golden horns so that she might be known from all other deer and her life thus preserved. For no good Hellen, or Greek, would slay for food any animal sacred to a god. This beautiful golden-horned hind Eurystheus ordered Hercules to bring to him alive, for the irreverence of the King did not go so far ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... traces a little deeper some pathway that tends toward a habit. The mistake is often made of thinking that habits can be formed only by "taking thought." It is true that some of the finest habits of life are built into character with painstaking effort, but untidiness and selfishness and irreverence and all their kin reach fullest unfolding in the thoughtless outflow of activity, ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... very few, where the throng is thick and the battle fierce. It saddens me to see good fellows trampling one another down, growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence: they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy one's courage and one's hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the hostess as she softly dropped her eyelids and smiled reprovingly; "this irreverence comes of visiting Miss Agnes Wilt too often. I ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... England is still, happily for itself, tinctured in all its language, habits, modes of feeling and thought, by a strict Scriptural training—"Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." Look below the surface and you will see that there is no irreverence whatever beneath Hosea Biglow's daring use of Scripture; only that "perfect love which casteth out fear;" that the very purpose of the whole book is to set up Christ's Gospel as the standard by which alone all men are to be judged in all their acts. We may disagree from ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... God, so precious, so inspiring, is treated with such utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as this same air of heaven. A sermon on oxygen, if we had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... reconcile his principles with the form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick. This was, in Mr. Cleaver's opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman's, and Froude's tutorship came to an end. There was no quarrel, and, after a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany. On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray. Dr. Pusey, however, was not at his ease He was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... at that; and here, lest I should draw my loyal Richard as he was not, let me say, once for all, that his oaths were but the outgushings of a warm and impulsive heart, rarely bitter, and never, as I believe, backed by surly rancor or conscious irreverence. ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... by Greek tragedy, displays the individual in conflict with Fate, an inscrutable power dominating alike the actions of men and of gods. It is the God of the gods,—the destiny of which they are the instruments and ministers. Through irreverence, through vainglory, through disobedience, through weakness, the tragic hero becomes entangled in the meshes that Fate sets for the unwary; he struggles and struggles to get free, but his efforts are necessarily of no avail. He has transgressed the law of laws, and he is therefore doomed ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... good, hoping better, and making the best of things in a practical way, the whole has to be reviewed at the end of each week by a hard hebdomadal board, on which a dozen clear thinkers sit aside and criticise all the rest of us. Perhaps it is a part of the irreverence of our times that one should gradually lose awe in the presence of this weekly printed wisdom. Or is it that experience finds types are just as fallible as tongues for telling truth, and that years give us hardiness even in the presence ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... was ook genoeg om'n mens regtig moeilijk en nukkerig te maak" (Ah, but it was enough to rouse and irritate a person). But what an utter absence of the faintest traces of some respect and deference. There are men whose cold-blooded brutishness and irreverence knock one over completely. One's person, one's profession, is no guarantee, no safeguard—nay, I verily believe some glory and revel in the act of making a ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... sociable than ravens, and what do they gain from such communalism? These are favourite questions with persons informed with an intelligent passion for acquiring information, and the best answer, without any thought of irreverence, is "God knows!" It is most certain that we, at any rate, do not. So far from explaining how it was that rooks came to build their nests in company, we cannot even guess how the majority of birds came to build nests at ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... me. Besides, though you will scarcely be able to believe it now, I DO honour her, and cannot help feeling that by doing as I do, I avoid irreverence, impertinence, rudeness—whichever is the right word for what ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... he was conscious of some irreverence in designating that stranger, even in his secret thoughts, by the sobriquet of M. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... followed them out, and seated himself among them, saying, "My children, the shepherd must be with his flock." This action, which covered them with confusion, prevented their being guilty of that irreverence any more. As he was one day going to church, he was accosted on the way by a woman who demanded justice against her son-in-law that had injured her. The woman being ordered by some standers-by to wait the patriarch's return from church, he overhearing them, said, "How can I hope ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... and Bea, early in autumn. They had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always—with a certain difficulty—he added something decorous ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... not—you must not, indeed. Do you know this irreverence in speaking of the members of so sacred a profession is not at all what ought to be done. Don't Edgar. Dear papa, I may be foolish, but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... it for ever from their murderous gripe. Thou knowest, too, that Sir Roger beareth thee a malice, and hath used all subtlety that he might have wherewith to seek occasion against thee. Didst thou not rebuke him openly for his irreverence, when that he must needs play with his puppy, that had its collar full of bells, during God's holy service—that comfortable form of worship established and publicly taught in the lifetime of our last good King Edward, and not ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... years he even became cynical and rugged and vulgar, in which we may of course trace the influence of his tavern associates. It is to his credit that he did not sink into Byronic misanthropy and bitter self-lacerating scorn, or even into Heine's irreverence ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the prophane irreverence of this conduct more striking than its ingratitude. When from reading that our Saviour was "the brightness of his Father's glory, and the express image of his person, upholding all things by the word of his power," we go on to consider the purpose for which he ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... defined and explained all heaven and earth by a priori theories, and cosmogonies invented in the cloister; and dared, poor, simple, ignorant mortals, to fancy that they could comprehend and gauge the ways of Him Whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain. This, this is irreverence: but it is neither irreverence nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery which encompasses him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand upon his mouth, with Job, and obey the voice which cries to him ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... respect for the fiddle, and their contempt for the almighty dollar. [Footnote: This phrase, used for the first time in this sketch, has since passed into current circulation, and by some has been questioned as savoring I fear, however, my prayer is of irreverence. The author, therefore, owes it to his orthodoxy to declare that no irreverence was intended even to the dollar itself; which he is aware is daily becoming more and more an object of worship.] I fear, however, my prayer is doomed to be of no ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... then there is the tenderness and piety due to those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty, wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghosts in those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for my inhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words about the letters ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... you understood it, dear old sceptic!" returned Balder, with affectionate irreverence, throwing his arm across his father's broad shoulders. "I say that every soul of right capacity, living for culture, and not afraid of itself, will at last reach that highest point. It is the sublime goal of man, and no human life is complete unless in gaining it. Many fail, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... are not nearly so superior as they suppose they are. They think "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" always comes from "the hardening of the heart." But youth has some fantastic as well as some noble dreams, so that docility is a better quality than independence in a very young person. If a worldly minded mother inculcates worldliness in her daughter, the ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... Jeremy, "he hath been up before light writing letters for London; and to punish thy irreverence, thou, Jonathan, shalt be the man to ride ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... enveloping his own violin in the paper, took the old wife of the soutar, and proceeded to perform upon her a trick which in a merry moment his master had taught him, and which, not without some feeling of irreverence, he had occasionally practised upon ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... as an intellectual and moral revolution. Every such revolution means some liberation of the intellect from bondage, and shows itself first of all in a temper of irreverence; the formulas of the old faith are no longer treated with respect and presently they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us, undermining the dignity and authority of objects and opinions and men that seemed half ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... then prevailed by an amusing story of an earlier occurrence. A boy who had lost his way in London was called a "popish cur" by a Whig because he ventured to inquire for Saint Anne's Lane, while he was cuffed for irreverence by a Tory when, correcting himself, he ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... hands of others, from Boccaccio downward, it has at least one quality that some greater achievements do not possess: it is absolutely pure in thought, word and suggestion. If it is filled with nonsense, that nonsense at any rate is innocent. It is modest, cleanly and without malice or irreverence. A worthier and nobler work might have been written; a purer work could ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... the end of religion is to pay God reverence and honor. Now it would savor of irreverence towards a superior, if one were to offer him that which properly belongs to his inferior. Since then whatever man offers by bodily actions, seems to be directed properly to the relief of human needs, or to the reverence of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... name, he would fall into deep reverie, lasting sometimes for hours. And although he contracted two marriages afterward, they were simply marriages of convenience, to which, after their termination, he frequently referred flippantly, sometimes with irreverence, for they ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... a gendarme and Sabina's black boy: the gendarme, with shouldered musket, is trying to look as stiff and cross as possible, being scandalised by his superior officer's defection from the path of duty; and still more by the irreverence of the black boy, who is dancing, grinning, snapping his fingers, in delight at having discovered and prevented ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... very slightly, benefited by ordinary medicines. In such cases, of course, there is not room for the display of an imaginary agency:—"For," as Crabbe says,—and I hope your medical readers will pardon the irreverence— ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... sufficient to place the rising generation on terms of the most perfect familiarity with a "Comic Latin Grammar." To the elder and middle-aged portion of the community, however, the very notion of such a work may seem in the highest degree preposterous; if not indicative of a degree of presumptuous irreverence on the part of the author little short of literary high treason, if not commensurate, in point of moral delinquency, with the same crime as defined by the common law of England. It is out of consideration for the praiseworthy, though perhaps erroneous, feelings of ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... propagation on Russian soil, the noble spirit of Russian literature has by a force I cannot but call divine been allowed to be propagated on foreign soil; and if the literature of the west, which is now stagnating in the pools of doubt, irreverence, mammon, and cold intellectualism, misnamed culture, is to be purified, the purification must come from the breath of Life which blows from Russia. This is the true meaning of the present craze for Russian ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... restricted constitutional form; she has all the venerable, splendid accessories—and I hope "Albert the Good" may have founded a long race of good kings; but it would not do for us;—a race cradled in revolution, and nurtured on irreverence and unbelief, as regards the divine right of kings and the law of primogeniture. To us it seems, though a primitive, an unnatural institution. We find no analogies for it, even in the wildest venture of the New World. It is true the buffalo herd has its ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... for the bishop in this matter." So much he spoke in anger, and then he corrected himself. "I crave the bishop's pardon, and yours as his messenger, if in the heat occasioned by my strong feelings I have said aught which may savour of irreverence towards his lordship's office. I respect his lordship's high position as bishop of this diocese, and I bow to his commands in all things lawful. But I must not bow to him in things unlawful, nor must I abandon my duty before God at his bidding, unless his ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... his great theory of positivism. What he chiefly amuses one with in this part of the world, however, is the solemn manner in which he treats the responsibility of giving increased publicity to such things, and invokes the Deity to witness that his objects are sincere, and he is influenced by no irreverence. This feeling may arise from a very creditable source, but a native of Scotland has difficulty in understanding it. In this country, being, as many of us have been, within the very skirts of the great contests ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... on, till they passed out of sight. I never heard them utter a sound, or saw them make a movement of any sort (I speak of what I saw at Daytona) except to fly straight on, one behind another. If church ceremonials are still open to amendment, I would suggest, in no spirit of irreverence, that a study of pelican processionals would be certain to yield edifying results. Nothing done in any cathedral could be more solemn. Indeed, their solemnity was so great that I came at last to find it almost ridiculous; ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, has become more and more indispensable to him: she sits at the head of the table and calls him "the coz." An eminent visitor was once put greatly out of countenance by this apparent irreverence. After obvious embarrassment, light dawned upon him towards the close of the meal. "Oh!" said he, "it's 'the coz' you call Mr. Ruskin. I thought you were saying' ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... which had adorned the nursery in my youth, and had been a never-failing source of curiosity to me. It was Gustave Dore's "Christian Martyrs," and I had once been deprived of pudding at the nursery dinner, because I had remarked (with irreverence wholly unintentional) that one of the lions seemed ill, and anxious to "climb up the wall and get away from the nasty martyrs." Thus it is that children are misunderstood by their elders! and now, as I gazed at the same picture on the monastery wall, I felt again all ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... with a morsel half-way to his mouth, glared at him several seconds, and then resumed his eating; not like a horse now, but like a bad dog gnawing an old bone. He glanced again angrily at the embodiment of irreverence opposite. Mr. Tarbox smiled. Claude let slip, not intending it, an audible growl, with his eyes in the plate. Mr. Tarbox's smile increased to a noiseless laugh, and grew and grew until it took hopeless possession of him. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... him, a rugged style of expression when speaking of things or persons or institutions which for the most part uplift our diction and generally induce us to adorn or make careful selection of our vocabulary. He rapped out expressions which might have suggested carelessness or irreverence or suppressed doubt, but I soon found that there was an intense fire of evangelistic zeal and an almost stormy enthusiasm for the conversion of ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... he turned to one of the truly good people in the hall, that had watched his devotion, and said, "Say, boss, this is evidently a new scheme. I thought this was Sherman's dancing school. You must excuse my seeming irreverence. If you will kick me down stairs I will consider it a special dispensation of providence," and he went down into the wicked world and asked a policeman where the dancing school was. All the way home the lady friend ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... the showman or the priests are to blame for my irreverence, or whether it is the fault of the system itself. The argument in favor of the adoration of images is that they make impressions on the senses which aid devotion; but, if the impressions made on my senses are to be considered, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... deeply disturbed by his idea of her Catholic propensities; and now what he deemed her disproportionate and misapplied veneration for the sublime edifice stung him into irreverence. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for sacred things" as a sad fault in some young women. He has seen them whispering in the church and Sunday school, during sermon and lesson, even during prayer, and has marked other acts of irreverence. It is to be hoped that this fault is indeed rare, unless it be in very young girls, who know no better. But as the fault has been pointed out by one who has been sorely pained by it, will not the girls ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... Milner, A.M., Master of the Grammar School of Kingston upon-Hull, 1789, p. 11. BOSWELL. Southey (Life of Wesley, i. 41), mentioning the names given at Oxford to Wesley and his followers, continues:—'One person with less irreverence and more learning observed, in reference to their methodical manner of life, that a new sect of Methodists was sprung up, alluding to the ancient school of physicians known by that name.' Wesley, in 1744, wrote The Humble Address to the King of the Societies in derision ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... benediction, the clergyman were to give vital significance to the vague word "Holy," and were to say, "the fellowship of the Helpful and Honest Ghost be with you, and remain with you always," what would be the horror of many, first at the irreverence of so intelligible an expression; and secondly, at the discomfortable occurrence of the suspicion that while throughout the commercial dealings of the week they had denied the propriety of Help, and possibility of Honesty, the Person whose company they had been now asking to be blessed ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... MERC. With what irreverence this lubber speaks of the Gods! My arm shall soon chastise this insolence; I shall have a fine game with him, stealing his name as well as ...
— Amphitryon • Moliere
... Heaven. Frequently during the night, impelled by love and by the mercy of God, I poured forth the feelings of my soul by conversing with him on loving and familiar language, as I had always done from my childhood, and then those who were watching me would accuse me of irreverence and disrespect towards God. Once, I happened to say that it appeared to me that I should be guilty of greater disrespect did I receive the Body of our Lord without having conversed familiarly with him, and I was severely reprimanded. Amid all these trials, I yet lived in peace with ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... not help a slight shudder at what seemed to him the irreverence of the epitaph, if indeed it was not deserving of a worse epithet. But he made no remark; and, after a moment's pause, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... He had no sooner arrived at the mountain than an old gray-headed man in tattered clothes came limping towards him and asking for help; but the selfish Pedro turned a deaf ear to the supplications of the old man, whom he pushed away with much disrespect. Ignorant of his doom, and regardless of his irreverence, Pedro walked on with hasty steps and high animal spirits. But lo! when his axe struck the oak, a large piece of wood broke off and hit him in the right ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... hurt challenge in his eyes for irreverence and incredulity and even perhaps good-natured jeers, but Garry, sensing something big and unfamiliar, held out his hand. Kenny wrung it in ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... silent, and declared that her remarks savored of irreverence. Startled and bewildered by such a criticism, the woman was indeed silent for some time, while her father-in-law flowed on and uttered his conviction. Yet not all his intensity and asseverations could justify such extravagant assertion. At another ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... century.[4] It is to be hoped and believed that, for the time being, this contention is well founded, but what assurance is there—if the Book which embodies the code of Christian morality may without irreverence be quoted—that "that which is done is that which shall be done"?[5] That is the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... them crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom he cannot change or influence, an outcast of the streets, a boy whom the mere animal appetites have turned into a small fiend. Never having had his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good; avarice, irreverence, and vindictiveness, are his nature; sorrow has no place in his memory; and from his brutish propensities the philosopher can take nothing away. The juxtaposition of two people whom such opposite means have put in the same moral position is a stroke of excellent art. There are plenty of incredibilities ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... over, out of and into the stillness, the loneliness, and the chill rigor of winter. Though authoritative in his class without any effort, he was indulgent to everything but conceit, slovenliness of mind and body, irreverence, and above all handling the Word of God deceitfully. On one occasion a student having delivered in the Hall a discourse tinged with Arminianism, he said, "That may be the gospel according to Dr. Macknight, or the gospel according to Dr. Taylor of Norwich, but it is not the gospel ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Indelicacy or irreverence is unpleasant in itself, and yet when complication is added to it few of us can avoid laughing, and I am afraid that some considerably enjoy objectionable allusions. To tell a man to go to h—-, or that he deserves to go there, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... absorbed the fact that, somehow or another, the Priest Captain had made a fool of him with a miracle that was not really a miracle at all, his choler rose in a manner most favorable to our purposes. Yet this very feeling of resentful anger—showing a growing irreverence of one to whom all the traditions of his people gave reverence second only to that due to the gods themselves—was startling evidence of the menace that our presence was to the theocratic ruler's temporal and spiritual power. Therefore it was with a keen curiosity that we listened—and Tizoc needed, ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Mary Carvel, in a tone of gentle reproach. She thought she detected the far-off shadow of a possible irreverence in her sister's tone. Macaulay again interposed, while Paul and I endeavored to avoid each other's eyes, lest we should be overtaken by an ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured procession of life, which includes the char-a-banc among its many chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... friends, into "Madonna." One or two extremely strict and extremely foolish people objected to any such familiar application of this name, as being open, in certain directions, to an imputation of irreverence. Mr. Blyth was not generally very quick at an answer; but, on this occasion, he had three answers ready before the objections were quite out ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... impressed by the sound as well as by the knowledge o' th' fact—"for," saith I, a-hammering away on a shoe for Joe Pebbles's brown nag King Edward (though I had often reasoned with Joe on account o' th' name, first because o' its irreverence, second on account o' th' horse not being that kind o' a horse, as 'twas a mare)—"for," saith I, as I made th' shoe, saith I, "'tis sure a great wickedness to steal a lass's sweetheart away from her!" saith I. And so 'twas; but, for all I could do, I could ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... are but forerunners. Mazzini sees much already,—at Milan, where he is, he has probably this day received the intelligence of the accomplishment of his foresight, implied in his letter to the Pope, which angered Italy by what was thought its tone of irreverence and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was responsible for this extraordinary petition. She tucked the child up in bed, mentally vowing that she should be taught a prayer the very next day, and was leaving the room with the light ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at the quaint conceit of the little woman, which lost its irreverence towards God in its reverence for His handiwork. "Now mother Tonks," said I, "I leave this lady in your charge for a time while I go into the town to see Master Dobson. I may be away some time, and you'll get us some supper. Anything ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... great experiment, and to the best of our judgment a successful one. The verses are easy, and, though rather in the ballad style, are free from any palpable irreverence. The plates are after the works of masters, and in the style, both of drawing and colouring, remind one of the severe and simple effect of old painted ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... God and His open book, without a feeling of new reverence for the Scriptures, and dependence on their Author for insight into their mysteries. The attitude of worship naturally suggests sober-mindedness and deep seriousness, and banishes frivolity. To treat that Book with lightness or irreverence would be doubly profane when one is in the posture ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... irreverence," he resumed; "but you know, dear Sergius, it is with laughter as with tears, we cannot always control it.... Anthony resolved to be a Saint, but was troubled by visions of beautiful women. To escape them, he followed some children of Islam into the desert. Alas! the visions ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... very much and often I would laugh, but without any irreverence, and I never was the least afraid of her. She was extremely lovely and had delicate and regular features, and her expression was very sweet. Her abundant hair was silver-gray, and upon her cheeks there was a color similar ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... This particular form of irreverence, however, has been a byword throughout all the ages; civilisation and education have done little to check it, possibly because the romantic spirit which forbids such crimes is born, not made. King Arthur's bones were dug up in the twelfth century. 'Mummie is become Merchandise, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... beyond the scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no irreverence to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as a proof that the deeds of earth, however ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of congratulation was a brief one. It seemed little short of irreverence to have seen at all that picture of Stefana rocking her roses in the little wooden rocker. Miss Theodosia slipped away with it hung on the walls of her mind—she would ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... agglomerate of human shreds and patches kneeling by the bedside of the dying murderer, to pray some comfort into his passing soul. But his "gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it," while through Helen ran a cold shudder of disgust at the familiarity and irreverence ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... the portraits, which they regarded with insular irreverence (what were French knights and dames to them?), then without awe spread the contents of their wallets on the board, and feasted ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... by interesting his reader in our native commodity by interspersing rural imagery, and incidental digressions, by clothing small images in great words, and by all the writer's arts of delusion, the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufacture, sink him under insuperable oppression; and the disgust which blank verse, encumbering and encumbered, superadds to an unpleasing subject, soon repels the reader, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... undressing, with perfect inattention to what she was saying. I asked her the purport of her prayers; she told me she said the "Our Father," and then the "Hail Mary:" at my request she repeated the latter, and I gave her a gentle lecture on the irreverence of chattering to God so volubly, and of employing herself about her clothes at the same time; adding that she should be devout, deliberate, and quiet while speaking to God; but as for the Virgin Mary it was no matter how she addressed her, if address her she would, for being only a dead ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... which Abdurachman brought me (it is highly improper to smoke while the Koran is being read or recited). He thanked me for the respect, and I told him I knew he would not smoke in a church, or while I prayed; why should I? It rather annoys me to find that they always expect from us irreverence to their religion which they would on no account be guilty of to ours. The little boy was a fellah, the child of my friend Omar, who has lost all his cattle, but who came as pleasant and smiling as ever to kiss ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon |
