"Ostentatious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a minute or two ago you paid me a very handsome compliment. Hang compliments! says I, and show a little confidence. Will you take my advice, and while making elaborate, even ostentatious, preparations for starting to-morrow morning, set off ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... the Lydian king. Contented with his successes, and satisfied that the tie of relationship secured him from attack on the part of the only power which he had need to fear, Croesus had for some years given himself up to the enjoyment of his gains and to an ostentatious display of his magnificence. It was a rude shock to the indolent and self-complacent dreams of a sanguine optimism, which looked that "to-morrow should be as to-day, only much more abundant," when tidings came that revolution had raised its head ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... have been livelier; but Italy was passing now through the valley of the shadow, and, save for the horrors of the Neapolitan prisons, was not much before the public for the moment. The intrigues of Louis Napoleon and the ostentatious aggression of the Pope in England were the matters of most interest in foreign politics, and both were overshadowed by the absorbing topic ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... avarice was indeed no part of the character of Themistocles, although he has been accused of those vices, because guilty, at times, of extortion. He was profuse, ostentatious, and magnificent above his contemporaries and beyond his means. His very vices were on a large and splendid scale; and if he had something of the pirate in his nature, he had nothing of the miser. When he had to ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have heard the swish of a bird's wing. As the horse's head touched the line of men, they slunk aside as if they knew not what they did, their eyes falling abashed before Sedgwick's quiet glance and air, as devoid of a trace of fear as it was of ostentatious defiance. The calm, unquestioning assumption that no one would presume to stop him, was a moral force which paralyzed the arm of the most reckless ruffian in the crowd. And so, checking his horse when ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... it may be replied, is not noisy and ostentatious; it is modest and private in its nature; it resides in a man's own bosom, and shuns the observation of the ...
— 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
... decidedly owing to the transference of the landed property from nobles and churchmen, to persons really interested in the cultivation of the soil, which had taken place before his time, and not to the empty and ostentatious patronage which he bestowed on it; the best proof of which is, that the main improvement that has taken place has not been, as already observed, in the principles or practice of agriculture, but in the quantity of land under tillage. It is true also, that certain manufactures have been encouraged ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... matter of official appointments, too, Governor Irving was consistent in his ostentatious hostility to Creoles in general, and to coloured Creoles in particular. Of the fifty-six appointments which that model Governor [66] made in 1876, only seven happened to be natives and coloured, out of a population in which the latter element is so preponderant as to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... too ostentatious and flaunted their new, green finery impudently and hid Neptune's satellite or—'twas cloudy, I could not see. Come, come, I must and thou, too, have sleep if the God thereof doth not wantonly spend too much time with thy mistress;—but thou shalt soon offset him and I may have, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... both wit and reason, then turn his own hypothesis inside out, confute it, dash it into senseless atoms, and dismiss it as unworthy of a thought. In short, among us lads, busy with books and full of admiration of our own cleverness, he was delightful; and among other ostentatious pedantries such as prevail at college his passed unrebuked. When he tried his wits with Mr. Floyd, that gentleman implored him for God's sake to hold his tongue and to consult Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, book 2, chapter 4, and discover the opinion of sensible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... kitchen, laundry, and dining-room, all in one, just over against the end of the lake; and enjoy a rasher of bacon and eggs with as much gusto as if we were in the midst of a palace of fresco. Ornamental eating has become with us a species of gaudy, ostentatious vulgarity; and a dining-room a sort of fool's paradise. I never think of the little simple meal at St. Peter's now, without ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... military reviews. In the beginning of his consulate, they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has been proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month. This ostentatious exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review of the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those occasions their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully has seized, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the driver (who had been to town and read novels) as he sat sideways on the box, passing his hand from the top to the bottom of his long whip, and trying to show off his accomplishments—"that ostentatious German has procured three light bays, and when he drives out with his lady—-oh, my! At Christmas he had a Christmas-tree in the big house. I drove some of the visitors there. It had 'lectric lights; you could not see the like of it in the whole of ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... allies, but rather as slaves. We are handed over to their prefects and centurions, who, when satiated with our plunder and with our blood, make way for others, who, under different names, renew the same outrages. If even at last Rome deigns to send us a legate, he oppresses us with an ostentatious and costly retinue, and with still more intolerable pride. The levies are again at hand which tear forever children from their parents, brothers from brothers. Now, Batavians, is our time. Never did Rome lie so prostrate as now. Let not their ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... real scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means, by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that conscious ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... old gentleman, also rising, and placing Phronsie on her feet, observing ostentatious care to keep her hand. "My house is open to you, Eunice," with a wave of his disengaged hand in old-time hospitality, "but of course you ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... of things without parade or dogmatism. Doubtful of all versatility as Kate was, she could not help admitting to herself that his truths were none the less true for their quantity or that he got at them without ostentatious processes. His talk certainly was more picturesque than her brother's, and less subduing to her faculties. John ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... arose from the coolness of the Bradshaws. With all the faults which had at times grated on his sensitive nature (but which he now forgot, and remembered only their kindness), they were his old familiar friends—his kind, if ostentatious, patrons—his great personal interest, out of his own family; and he could not get over the suffering he experienced from seeing their large square pew empty on Sundays—from perceiving how Mr Bradshaw, though he bowed in a distant manner when he and Mr Benson met face ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... respective amounts, and so to guard themselves against giving less than others have done. Mr. A. is inclined to give L20, but waits to see if Mr. B. gives L25, in which case he will raise his intended L20 to L30. These tactics are adopted, not because either of the candidates desires to be lavish or ostentatious in his gifts, and still less from any vulgar desire for notoriety in itself. They are simply an element, almost vital under existing conditions, of a successful appeal to the electorate. They may be said to be of ...
— Proportional Representation - A Study in Methods of Election • John H. Humphreys
... picture—is it not?) where the mystic visitors look like shepherds who had not even dreamt of God? But I always understood that that Dulwich Gallery was famous for great works—you surprise me! And for painters ... their badness is more ostentatious than that of poets—they stare idiocy out of the walls, and set the eyes of sensitive men on edge. For the rest, however, I very much doubt whether they wear their lives more to rags, than writers who mistake their ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... you drive along the chasm between long ranks of photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime Niagara; and a great many people have the ineffable effrontery or the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... mirrors, gold scent bottles, and other idiocies, its bouncing bouquet of fresh violets, its electric fittings, its air pillow embroidered with silver monograms and crests, its brocade-lined chinchilla rugs, tricky little extra seats, and marvellous springs, struck Peter as disgustingly ostentatious. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... that he was watching her alertly with his great golden eyes. Equally was it of the game that the Shah de Perse should affect—save for his alert watching—a like disregard of the doings of Madame Jolicoeur: usually by an ostentatious pretence of washing his upraised hind leg, or by a like pretence of scrubbing his ears. These conventions duly having been observed, Madame Jolicoeur would seat herself in her especial easy-chair, above the relatively high back of which her night-capped ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... no desire for display or ostentatious extravagance, but he loved to please his children, and was sufficiently rewarded by their enjoyment of the ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favourite sermon, Doctor Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London. So amiable was her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and sometimes not present at all, the lines are of less extreme lawlessness in point of length than their older Saxon representatives, and, above all, there is a creeping in of rhyme. It is feeble, tentative, and obvious, confined to ostentatious pairs like "brother" and "other," "might" and "right," "fare" and "care." But it is a beginning: and we know that ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... angrily. Rosy sometimes sat with her left hand pressed affectedly against her pink cheek, with the ring-finger bent slightly outward; and then she held up her spelling-book before her with her left hand, and the same ostentatious finger. ...
— Comfort Pease and her Gold Ring • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... myself, who once said in print of him—that it is not the correct way of speaking, to say that Wordsworth is as proud as Lucifer; but, inversely, to say of Lucifer that some people have conceived him to be as proud as Wordsworth. But, if proud, Wordsworth is not haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of descending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth would be jealous ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... the idea of any change in her existing mode of life. To her, the friendship she proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution; it was but the due fulfilment of her natural functions. To make of it an occasion for ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to her as unnatural as is the practice of the barbarians in our midst who use a wedding—that most sacred and private event in a young girl's life—as an opportunity for display of the coarsest and crudest character. To rivet the attention of friends ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... money according as you think proper, and if you wish to favor me do not bestow any of it toward public collections. I dislike this ostentatious mode of benevolence." ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... abed. But his address, sir, is No. 32, Rue de la Croix Blanche, on the first floor, the door on your right as you mount the stairs; you know the room well, citizen Chauvelin; you have been in it before. And now," he added with a loud and ostentatious yawn, "shall we all to bed? We start at dawn, you said, and I am so ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... texture had set it up against the seat, while he prepared to strip off his jerkin. Halfman assisted Sir Blaise to extricate himself from his beribboned doublet, and the two men faced each other in their shirts, Evander's linen fine and plain, like all about him, Sir Blaise's linen fine and ostentatious, like all about him, and reeking of ambergris. Evander was not a small man, but his body seemed very slender by contrast with the well-nourished bulk of the country-gentleman, and many a one would have held ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... France thrust into a position of unwilling isolation. Thiers, who had been made Minister, expected that Mehemet would be able to retain his conquests, and for a time it looked as though France would interfere to protect him. Ultimately, in spite of some ostentatious preparations in France, peaceful counsels prevailed, and Thiers found it advisable to retire in favour ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... countryman, the Rev. Dr. J.P. Thompson, long-beloved pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle Church, New York. Here, also, Bayard Taylor was for a time laid to rest, before being finally removed to his native land. Decorations are not so ostentatious as in Catholic countries; and quiet ivy, simple greensward, and the shadow of trees in which birds may sing, make the quaint Berlin cemeteries attractive places. This was to us especially true of the ancient ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... succession of minute and pungent triumphs: as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out of the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a part of my slender purse to his plump leather bag; or when some ostentatious gentleman should throw a coin to the ragged beggar who was richer than himself; or when, though he would not always be so decidedly diabolical, his pretended wants should make him a sharer in the scanty living of ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification—a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really rhetorical motive—which plays so large a part there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously exact of it, from syllable ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... gold were emptied underneath the trees and elves had scattered pieces here and there from out the mass. Birds were building in all the thickets, and the young leaves—virgin green—shyly hid their love-making. Everything alive was possessed with a new-found energy. The sparrows—most ostentatious of any bird there is—flew about, trailing long threads of hay, with an air as if they carried the Golden Fleece in their beaks each time they returned to the apple trees. But other creatures were as busy as ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... day every day of the week, and then read it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin out of them to write and speak. And, then, for the outside knowledge of the passing day he will read the newspapers, and ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... was straying away again from his mother. Her stick was tied to a peg in the ground and she could not follow him. A part-grown puppy, somewhat larger and older than he, came toward him slowly, with ostentatious and belligerent importance. The puppy's name, as White Fang was afterward to hear him called, was Lip-lip. He had had experience in puppy fights and was already something ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... moved alertly about the room. She accepted her husband's ostentatious hand and chair, and when he resumed the conversation, or rather restarted it, on the subject of Robert's achievements at school, she followed where he led, so long as he did not seem leading towards Deb's pocket, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... lifted up its voice with unwonted emphasis, as if, unnoticed through the bustling week, Sunday was its vantage ground, to proclaim to mortals the swift flight of time. And if the old pedant performed the task with something of an ostentatious precision, it was because in that house nothing else put on official airs, and the clock felt the responsibility of doing ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ruling class of the South—an aristocracy as intense, proud, and inflexible as ever existed—not limited either by customs or institutions, not recognised and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secret, disowning its own existence, baptized with ostentatious names of democracy, obsequious to the people for the sake of governing them; this nameless, lurking aristocracy, that ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, that produced nothing, but lay coiled in the body, feeding on its nutriment, and holding ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Creditors, and the Insolence of Sheriffs and Bailiffs, and to live at peace here, with quiet Minds and easy Circumstances. This is a true Notion of a Refugee, and I think such People come over fast enough without such ostentatious Proclamations to give them new Encouragements: My Conduct always took a different Turn, and if I had liv'd a little longer, I had wrote a Treatise to prove Ireland, the most inhospitable and barbarous ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... to Oxford just before the close of the term. He found his ward established in elegant and luxurious apartments, quite fit for a royal prince, and very much more ostentatious than the unpretending chambers occupied by the young Marquis of Arondelle at Cambridge, and ridiculously extravagant for a young man of limited income and no ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... was an exceedingly respectable and wealthy man. Many worthy persons indulge in this fond notion, that they are imposing upon the world; strive to fancy, for instance, that their bankers consider them men of property because they keep a tolerable balance, pay little tradesmen's bills with ostentatious punctuality, and so forth—but the world, let us be pretty sure, is as wise as need be, and guesses our real condition with a marvellous instinct, or learns it with curious skill. The London tradesman is one ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... saying at him, and watch his awkward attempts to catch it, and then while he was just on the point of getting at some idea of it to bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognized as part of the business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of place when adopted by a layman and a man of the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... itself, a scent of carrion makes you start. You look, against the will of your smart and ostentatious guide, through a half-open door, and see another sight—a room, dark and foul, mildewed and ruinous; and, swept carelessly into a corner, a heap of dirt, rags, bones, waifs and strays of every ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... life. They were scholars, not common nor superficial; but their scholarship was so in keeping with their character, so blended and inwrought, that careless observers, or bad judges, not seeing an ostentatious display of it, might infer that it did not exist; forgetting, or not knowing, that classical learning in men who act in conspicuous public stations, perform duties which exercise the faculty of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... and to whom they should be given. Attending circumstances, of course, always govern the exact conditions. Very often guests, both men and women, unable to estimate correctly what amount is befitting the servants' services, tip lavishly and without any regard for services. This borders on the ostentatious, and hence, may be ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... hand, an utter absence of original development. Where the Greek master lightly sketches, the Etruscan disciple lavishes a scholar's diligence; instead of the light material and moderate proportions of the Greek works, there appears in the Etruscan an ostentatious stress laid upon the size and costliness, or even the mere singularity, of the work. Etruscan art cannot imitate without exaggerating; the chaste in its hands becomes harsh, the graceful effeminate, the terrible hideous, and the voluptuous obscene; and these features become ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... would do that," said Percy Saville, who had just done it. "Certainly there is a good deal of truth in the sketch of the ostentatious, over-dressed Johnsons who, as everybody knows, are meant for ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... or learning they may happen to possess. I own, with submission, that I do not see either the necessity or propriety of this advice. For if a young lady has that discretion and modesty, without which all knowledge is little worth, she will never make an ostentatious parade of it, because she will rather be intent on acquiring more, than on displaying what ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... watching them, and was preparing for their reception at Dover, not soldiers, but the friendly assistance of his servant, Mr. Day, the Clerk of the Passage. In true Cavalier fashion the Earl of Rochester and his comrades approached our shores, with ostentatious contempt of danger. They came not in a small party, dropping over one by one, selecting different and out-of-the-way spots for landing, but almost in a body, in quick succession, they alighted at Dover. That was the most public port they could have chosen; and being courtier ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... carried out with almost too perfect effect; as it appeared that Jim, in order to give dramatic intensity to the fractiousness of Clarence's horse, had inserted a thorn apple under the neck of his saddle, which Clarence only discovered in time to prevent himself from being unseated. Urged forward by ostentatious "Whoas!" and surreptitious cuts in the rear from Jim, pursuer and pursued presently found themselves safely beyond the half-dry stream and fringe of alder bushes that skirted the camp. They were not followed. Whether the teamsters suspected and ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Ali has faithfully described the first ostentatious interview, in which the conqueror, whose spirits were harmonized by success, affected the character of generosity. But his mind was insensibly alienated by the unseasonable arrogance of Bajazet; and Timur ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... large contract which he has undertaken. "Records" is a pretty poor word there, but I think the use of it is due to hasty translation. In the original the word is 'fastes'. I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great "American soul" secreted behind the ostentatious of Newport; and that he was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery: "the nature of the people" of the United States of America. We have been accused of being ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Dauvray as we find her—rich, ostentatious, easily taken by a new face, generous, and foolishly superstitious—and you have in her a living provocation to every rogue. By a hundred instances she proclaimed herself a dupe. She threw down a challenge to every criminal to come and ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... Miss Moorsom's eyes stared black as night, searching the space before her. Far away the Editor strutted forward, Willie following with his ostentatious manner of carrying his bulky and oppressive carcass which, however, did not remain exactly perpendicular ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination—her personal radiance—but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal. Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... not always the means or the wish to acquire extensive and accurate knowledge. Though a Parisian belle, she had read with attention some of those books which are generally thought too dry or too deep for her sex. Consequently her benevolence was neither wild in theory, nor precipitate nor ostentatious ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... as for the humility of the lady whom I was about to meet. If the parlor of Mrs. Clifford bore such sufficient tokens of her weakness of intellect, her own costume betrayed still more. She had made her person a sort of frame or rack upon which she hung every particle of that ostentatious drapery which she was in the habit of wearing at her fashionable evenings. A year's income was paraded upon her back, and the trumpery jewels of three generations found a place on every part of her person where it is usual for fashionable folly to display such gewgaws. She sailed into ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of those ostentatious acts of generosity which are dictated by the policy of princes, at least as much as by their compassion; but the grief of Marie Antoinette was profound, and lasted several days; nothing could console her for the loss of so many innocent victims; she spoke of it, weeping, to her ladies, one ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... slept in an outhouse in order the better to delude the servants. He read the Koran sedulously, howled his prayers with a local shaykh who imparted to him the niceties of the faith, purified himself, made an ostentatious display of piety, and gave out that he was a hakim or doctor preparing to be a dervish. As he had some knowledge of medicine, this role was an easy one, and his keen sense of humour made the experience enjoyable ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... tolerance in religious matters. A lawyer named Crosbie was denounced merely because he had in the way of his regular business drawn up the Bill intended for Parliament. It was inevitable that the action of intolerance in Scotland should come before the notice of Parliament. Wilkes, always ostentatious in the cause of liberty, called upon Dundas to bring in his relief measure for Scotland. When Dundas declared that it was better to delay the measure until cooler judgment might prevail, Wilkes denounced him for allowing Parliament to truckle to ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... spoke with bitterness, but Mrs. Crane was reminded instantly of her own affairs. "I feel condemned that I ain't begun my own fall cleanin' yet," she said, with an ostentatious sigh. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... found the Liberal Donor Professorship of Systematic and Metaphysical Theology, and still other sums to establish the Liberal Donor Orthopedic Chirurgical Gratuitous Hospital for Cripples and Clubfooted. Shall I say that the man is not generous, but only ostentatious? Not at all. He might gratify his vanity in other ways. His vanity dominates over his benevolence, and makes it pay tribute to his own glory. But his benevolence is genuine, notwithstanding. Plausaby was mercenary, and he may have seen some advantages to himself in having ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... surround themselves with beautiful things, and any but the simplest comforts. Some people are of that opinion still, but I do not agree with them. Your own good sense will be the best criterion of what is unduly ostentatious; but never hesitate to have anything you may wish because you fear the verdict of others. In short, be independent, and think for yourself if you wish to be happy. Your Aunt Helen has undertaken the charge of your ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... boast &c. 884. render vain &c. adj.; inspire with vanity &c. n.; inflate, puff up, turn up, turn one's head. Adj. vain, vain as a peacock, proud as a peacock; conceited, overweening, pert, forward;, vainglorious, high-flown; ostentatious &c. 882; puffed up, inflated, flushed. self-satisfied, self-confident, self-sufficient, self-flattering, self-admiring, self-applauding, self-glorious, self-opinionated; entente &c. (wrongheaded) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... habit of jealousy as she had given up eating sweets, because both were murderous to her complexion. Not that Hippisley gave her any cause. He had ceased to cultivate the society of young and pretty ladies, and devoted himself with almost ostentatious fidelity to Lena. Their affair had become irreproachable with time; it had the permanence of a successful marriage without the unflattering element of legal obligation. And he had kept his secretary. Lena had left off being afraid either that Ethel would leave or that Hippisley would put some ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... of his own garden, calling it a unique and curious exotic, and hold forth on his carnations, his country-house, and his old English hospitality, though he never invited a friend to come down to a Sunday's dinner. Mean and ostentatious, insolent and servile, he did not know whether to treat those he conversed with as if they were his porters or his customers. The 'prentice boy was not yet ground out of him, and his imagination ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had a large amount of petty vanity in his composition which manifested itself by an ostentatious and overdone disregard of all personal considerations. He straightened his lips and looked rigidly at the roll of papyrus, while his heart filled with bitterness against the whole ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in ostentatious rebuke. "Mike!" she cried, laughingly, as the action was repeated. "Ye rowdy, air ye go-un to fight ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... given me for a half dozen Christmases, and she had a purple veil wrapped around her head, to hide Heaven knows what deficiency. She examined the empty egg-nog glass, inquired what the evening paper had said about the weather, and then stalked into the dressing-room, and prepared, with much ostentatious creaking, to sit ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Magpie, who begins several nests at the same time; but only one is intended to receive the brood, and that only is completed. The aim of the others is merely to distract attention. It is around these latter that the bird shows ostentatious activity, while it works at the real nest only for a few hours during the day, ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable, Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness for the disclosure he was about to make, "because I know you don't mean half you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I make this little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... all this truculence and the ostentatious way in which the little green flags were trampled on and insulted, was too much for Jimmy and his ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... always to be sacrificed to the nobler beauties of variety and instruction; and that a play written with nice observation of critical rules, is to be contemplated as an elaborate curiosity, as the product of superfluous and ostentatious art, by which is shown, rather what is possible, than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... looked around this morning she could see the workmen busily engaged in restoring the gardens to their original symmetry and beauty. The Hartleys were by no means purse proud or ostentatious, and their sudden acquisition of a great fortune in no way changed their simple, pleasant attitude toward life. But they were now enabled to live in their dear old home, without financial anxieties, and moreover, were able to repair ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... of individuality, there has been, as all men know and no one will dispute, a most perceptible tendency of late years towards what is known as the array of one portion of the community—the preponderating, voting portion—against another—the more ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid growth,—production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher than greed ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... is most noble to feed the widow and to clothe the orphan; but where is the beneficence of the deed if the wife and children of the ostentatious donor—the victims of the performance of such acts—are left themselves to endure misery and privations, from which his inadequate means cannot exempt the stranger and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... the calm, scornful face of your sister Charlotte at her side. Do you notice with what ostentatious obedience and attention she devotes herself ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... her head. She had but slight confidence in her husband's insight into character, and sighed in an ostentatious way. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... were left, by persons unknown, in the houses of poor women, who received with them very considerable sums of money. At first, no suspicion whatever fell on the friars, who continued their offices of preaching, saying mass, confessing penitents, and giving ostentatious indications of their leading humble and ascetic lives. A diligent watch was instituted by the authorities, but as far as exterior observances went, there was no reason to believe that any suspicious persons from without ever entered the convent of the nuns; it was therefore thought right ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... matures, like the fruits of their native clime, early and rapidly, it is sad to know that it also fades prematurely. One looks in vain for that serene loveliness combined with age which so frequently challenges our admiration at the North. Their costume is never ostentatious, though often costly, and sometimes a little too mixed or variegated when seen in public. At home, however, nothing of this sort is observed. There the dress is usually composed of the most delicate muslin, the finest linen, and richest silks. We must admit that one rarely sees elsewhere such ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... and poultry. Some of the rajas are supposed to have amassed a sum equal to ten or twenty thousand dollars, which is kept in ingots of gold and silver, much of the latter consisting of small Dutch money (not the purest coin) melted down; and of these they make an ostentatious display at weddings and ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... "up-stairs," occupied by the children and Hepsy Ann's self; and finally, but most important of all, the parlor, a mysterious and hermetically sealed apartment, which almost seemed to me an unconsecrated spot in this little temple of the homely virtues and affections,—a room furnished in a style somewhat ostentatious and decidedly uncomfortable, swept and dusted on Saturday afternoons by Hepsy Ann's own careful hands, sat in by the Captain and her for an hour or two on Sundays in awkward state, then darkened and locked for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... he is the only European resident of Asterabad save a few Cossack attendants, he wears fashionable Parisian clothes, a wealth of watch-chain, rings, and flash jewellery, patent-leather shoes, and all the accompaniments of an ostentatious show of wealth and personal magnificence. His rooms are equally gorgeous, and contain large colored portraits ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... car he got the oars of the old flat bottom boat belonging to the troop. He also procured a black marking stick used for marking scout signs on rocks, and a pasteboard target on the back of which he printed in ostentatious lettering. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... gods," said Surface, "that you never have such reason to hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and there was none so poor to ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... They've hit it, the same as us. You tossed off a home-stake, kid. Don't believe it, eh? Well, here's the proof- coarse gold from Hunker." With an ostentatious flourish the speaker flung down a half-filled poke, together with a bar check. "Cash me in, and don't let any of it ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... or two of the principal parts or characters.' Ravenscroft's assertion deserves acceptance. The tragedy, a sanguinary picture of the decadence of Imperial Rome, contains powerful lines and situations, but is far too repulsive in plot and treatment, and too ostentatious in classical allusions, to take rank with Shakespeare's acknowledged work. Ben Jonson credits 'Titus Andronicus' with a popularity equalling Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy,' and internal evidence shows that Kyd was capable of writing much of 'Titus.' It was suggested ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... unequivocal proof of the good opinion, the affection, and disposition of my country to serve me; and I should be hurt, if by declining the acceptance of it, my refusal should be construed into disrespect, or the smallest slight upon the generous intention of the legislature; or that an ostentatious display of disinterestedness, or public virtue, was the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... with a parrot. She was a wealthy, ostentatious person, who had been an only child ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... thick ivy and wall flowers. The pedlar sat on a large gray stone, with his red cap on and his brown fingers adorned with splendid rings, and he spread them out and waved his hands to the people with ostentatious ceremony. ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... spoken in a tone of humorous extravagance which piqued my curiosity. Behind the ostentatious deference with which he had raised his hat to the sky, beneath the respectful awe with which he spoke the lady's name, I detected irony ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... unmarried woman had appropriated certain rather large trust sums and had presented them to her servant. At first every suspicion of the influence of sex was set aside. Only the discovery of the fact that in her ostentatious piety she had set up an altar in her house, and compelled her servant to pray at it in her company, called attention to the deep interest of this very ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... arches were erected there in honor of Caligula and Nero, who probably honored it by visits. It possessed costly temples, handsome theatres and other public buildings, luxurious residences, and all the ostentatious magnificence arising from the wealth of the proud patricians ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... young men dressed expensively and wearing arms, were exchanging jokes with that sort of ostentatious laughter which implies a desire to prove that the laughter is not mortified though some people might suspect it. There were good reasons for such a suspicion; for this broad-shouldered man with the red feather was Dolfo Spini, leader ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... beauty and of their wardrobe, pluming themselves as if they never could grow old, and casting around them their piercing glances and no less poignant raillery. But Horace Walpole is not content with thus displaying his dazzling bevy of heroines; he reveals them in their less ostentatious moments, and makes us as familiar with their weaknesses as with the despotic power of their beauty. Nothing that transpired in the great world escaped his knowledge, nor the trenchant sallies of his wit, rendered the more cutting by his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... be. Swift talked about the prospects of ending the strike. He regarded it as a reportorial feast, and had natural regrets that such good material for lurid paragraphs was to be cut off. As they passed through the Levee, he nodded to the proprietors of the "places," with ostentatious familiarity. From the Levee they took an electric car, which was crowded with officers and deputies bound for the stock yards. The long thoroughfare lined with rotting wooden houses and squalid brick saloons was alive with people that swarmed over the roadbed like ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... dismissal for himself. The princess, too, had special sources of income, which were usually squandered in rivalry with the boyardesses, in jewellery, dress, and other luxuries.[160] It is said that one of the princesses, being offended with a lady of rank for excelling her in the ostentatious richness of her dress and personal adornments, caused her to be exiled; and that when she had secured a sufficiently large sum to purchase a more magnificent apparel than her rival, she allowed her to return to court, in order that she might enjoy her humiliation. The complaints of the ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... grained. He has no idea of truth except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has seemingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ostentatious obtrusion of knowledge, in which those who hear us cannot sympathize, it is a fault of which soldiers, sailors, sportsmen, gamesters, cultivators, and all men engaged in a particular occupation, are quite as guilty as scholars; ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... people of mixed blood—the practical was still necessity, but almost every thatched and wattled hut had its swinging orchid branch, and perhaps a hideous painted tub with picketed rim, in which grew a golden splash of croton. This ostentatious floweritis might furnish a theme for a wholly new phase of the subject—for in almost every respect these people are less worthy human beings—physically, mentally and morally—than the Indians. But one cannot shift literary overalls for ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... zero in Nelly's neighbourhood. The women ignored her altogether. Winslow set his teeth together and registered a mental vow to wring Rufus Hent's sunburned neck at the first opportunity. He escorted Nelly to the table and waited on her with ostentatious deference, while Mrs. Keyton-Wells glanced at him stonily and made up her mind to tell his mother when ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... opened brilliantly in the home of Calvin Wentworth, a millionaire mine-owner. Into the garish and vulgarly ostentatious reception-room a pale, sweet slip of a girl drifted, with big eyes shining with joy of her home-coming. Some of the auditors again failed to recognize the great actress, so wonderful was her transformation in look and manner. The critics themselves, dazed ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... about twelve years old, related by one of these teachers. She had been reading in her classical history the story of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi—how she proudly presented her sons to the ostentatious and much-bediamonded Roman dame, with the words, "These are my jewels." "She should have said my Cornelians," ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... determination to strike nearer the mines themselves. Powerful expeditions were therefore openly organized at Jamaica and elsewhere, for the purpose of making descents upon the cities and towns of the Spanish main. The temptations to such a course were indeed strong; and the Spaniards, by their ostentatious display, materially assisted in their own ruin. For instance, the city of Lima, in 1682, on the occasion of the public entry of the viceroy, actually had the streets paved with ingots of silver, to the amount of seventeen millions sterling! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a surveyor, or a city clerk out for a holiday? Was there perhaps a youthful female of his species somewhere for whom he was waiting and upon whose tryst she was now breaking? Was he—terrible thought!—the outlying picket of some family picnic? His dress, neat, simple, free from ostentatious ornament, betrayed nothing. ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... of memorandums, and a diary extending back for many years, from which had we the space to spare in this book we would place before the world some of the gems found in his jewel-box, as indicative of the man's industry and the Christian's freedom from ostentatious display. ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... she bade him transcribe incantations out of the Chin Kang Canon and intonate them. Chia Huan accordingly came and seated himself on the stove-couch, occupied by Madame Wang, and, directing a servant to light the candles, he started copying in an ostentatious and dashing manner. Now he called Ts'ai Hsia to pour a cup of tea for him. Now he asked Yu Ch'uan to take the scissors and cut the snuff of the wick. "Chin Ch'uan!" he next cried, "you're in the way of the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the pass, expressed his satisfaction and handed it back to Prescott, who replaced it in his waistcoat pocket with ostentatious care. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... his friends and acquaintances. Some had one entrance, some another, and it is probable that he always reserved ways of entrance and egress unknown to any except himself. At the very time that he evaded the solicitude of Banbridge with regard to his haunts in the City he was more than open, even ostentatious concerning them to some parties in the City itself, but he was silent regarding Banbridge. It may have been for the reason that he did not for the present wish to mix the City and Banbridge, that he wished to preserve mysteries concerning himself in the regard of both. It is ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ejaculated Patrick Brennan, with all the ostentatious virtue of the recently reformed, "here's ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... oaths, in proportion as the Puritans laid them down; and as the tresses of the Cavaliers waved more luxuriantly, the hair of the Roundheads was more scrupulously shorn. And the same instinctive exaggeration was constantly extending into manners and morals also. Both sides became ostentatious; the one made the most of its dissoluteness, and the other of its decorum. The reproachful names applied derisively to the two parties became fixed distinctions. The word "Roundhead" was first used early in 1642, though whether it originated with Henrietta Maria or with David Hyde ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... included in Sattwa or Goodness are gladness, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, fame, righteousness, contentment, faith, sincerity, liberality, and lordship. The nine properties included in Rajas or Passion are belief in the deities, (ostentatious) charity, enjoyment and endurance of happiness and sorrow, disunion, exhibition of manliness, lust and wrath, intoxication, pride, malice, and disposition to revile. The eight qualities included in Tamas or Darkness are ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... brethren; and he was at length regarded as the great fountain of patronage and preferment. Long before Christianity enjoyed the sanction of the state, the chief pastors of the great cities began to attract attention by their ostentatious display of secular magnificence. Origen, who flourished in the former half of the third century, strongly condemns their vanity and ambition; and though perhaps his ascetic temperament prompted him to indulge somewhat in the language of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... name for me! I will go in. Rejected again—nothing till Thursday fortnight! I am beginning to feel like an unpopular man at a dance. I regard the people wallowing at the windows with a growing hate; they are the elect—but that is no reason why they should parade it in that ostentatious way—bad taste!... Can't get any rooms along these terraces—I subdue my pride, and try ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... left the town by the Bathminster road. It was a blustering, stare-one-in-the-face kind of house, which defied one to question the financial stability of its occupants. The Devitts were like their home in being new, ostentatious folk; their prosperity did not extend further back than the father of Montague, the present ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper. The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shuffled out of his expressions, but refused to apologise; the chairman (Bernal) took no notice, and the matter ended by a speech from Stanley and a few remarks upon it from Lord John Russell. The former stated his reasons for this ostentatious locomotion, which amounted to this: that he had been rudely treated in the House by ironical cheers and other intelligible sounds, and attacked by the Government newspapers, and he had, therefore, departed from a society for which he owned he was not ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... not resign the first claim on her child, without indulging her tears, Maud wept, too; but it was as much in sympathy for Beulah's happiness, as from any other cause. The marriage in other respects, was simple, and without any ostentatious manifestations of feeling. It was, in truth, one of those rational and wise connections, which promise to wear well, there being a perfect fitness, in station, wealth, connections, years, manners and habits, between the parties. Violence ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... and small and dun-coloured, exactly like those of every other French-Algerian settlement, but big new blocks of glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists, save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... young Mosses, who immediately ran in with the exciting news to their mother, so that Mrs. Moss was again on the door-step when her brother rode up. She had been crying, but was rocking baby to sleep in her arms now, and made no ostentatious show of sorrow as her brother looked at her, but ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... stepdaughter. One of the underlings from the stable was ready to take her horse. She dismounted unaided, flung the reins to the groom, and walked up to the Captain with her firmest step. When she was in the hall he shut the door, and bolted and locked it with a somewhat ostentatious care. She seemed to breathe less freely when that great door had shut out the cool night. She felt as if she were ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... than Garibaldi had taken the present moment to make a visit—an almost ostentatious visit—to Mazzini, it might be a grave question how far all the warm enthusiasm of this popular reception could be justified. Garibaldi is, however, the one man in Europe from whom no one expects anything but impulsive action. It is in the very unreflectiveness of his ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... holding, stretched out in his hand, his own plumed hat; and the horse, instead of the usual waterfall for a tail, possessed a somewhat attenuated appendage that somehow appeared out of keeping with his ostentatious behaviour. One felt that a horse with a tail like that would not have ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... he resumed his general lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister Mary's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother,—in subsequent times a little ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... structures wherever you go. Probably the exactions to which wealth is subject here has much to do with this; all are concerned to hide their resources, but I am told the Chinese educated mind has really reached the stage in which ostentatious display is regarded with contempt. It seeks escape from ceremony and show, in sweet simplicity of living, as most truly great men have done and are doing more ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had previously decided that Mr. Quisante would be much better in company, was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and ostentatious. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... sensitiveness, she was quick to see and feel. There was a new expression in the eyes of the passersby with whom she exchanged glances. Eyes which for years had stared at her with impudence, indifference, or ostentatious blankness now held a sort of friendly inquiry, something conciliatory, which told her they would have spoken had they not been met by the immobile mask of imperturbability ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... with much pomp, and with festivities which lasted three days. The fourteen vacancies which existed were filled with the names of various distinguished personages. With this last celebration the public history of Philip the Good's ostentatious and ambitious order of knighthood was closed. The subsequent nominations were made 'ex indultu apostolico', and without ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for the Saxon arms, but this view is certainly not supported by the chroniclers. It is true that both at Wareham and Exeter the pagans broke new ground, and secured their position, from which no doubt they did sore damage in the neighboring districts, but we can trace in these years none of the old ostentatious daring and thirst for battle with Alfred. Whenever he appears the pirate bands draw back at once into their strongholds, and, exhausted as great part of Wessex must have been by the constant strain, the West Saxons ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... of the Purisima was not completed until so late as 1886, and is justly considered the finest modern church structure in Mexico. As one passes out into the surrounding squalor and obtrusive poverty, it is impossible not to moralize as to the costly, theatrical, and ostentatious road which seems to lead ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... and abuses this aristocracy, as unfit longer to govern the State, as a worn-out power that deserved to fall. He uniformly represents them as extravagant, selfish, ostentatious, luxurious, frivolous, Epicurean in opinions and in life, oppressive in all their social relations, haughty beyond endurance, and controlling the popular elections by means of bribery and corruption. It would be difficult ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... perform functions which immediately concern all, which most personally comprehend, and which many in their civic spheres believe they could accomplish in a manner not less satisfactory, though certainly less ostentatious. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... his career, as to what was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether sympathetically. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... thick-set man with sparse black hair plastered over a greasy forehead, his shirt open at the neck, revealing a powerful chest and rough, hairy skin, spat in ostentatious contempt upon the floor. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... their kind, in a corner), pray let them display it. But there is a subscription for these [Greek: thrasy/deiloi][110] (they need not be ashamed of the epithet once applied to the Spartans); and all the charitable patronymics, from ostentatious A. to diffident Z., and L1 1s. 0d. from 'An Admirer of Valour,' are in requisition for the lists at Lloyd's, and the honour of British benevolence. Well! we have fought, and subscribed, and bestowed peerages, and buried the killed by our friends and foes; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... in all places that they visited, of a general prosperity combined with great simplicity of life and quiet domesticity. Homely comfort was to be seen everywhere, but not even in the mansions of the merchant princes of Amsterdam was there any ostentatious display of wealth and luxury. Probably of no other people could it have been said that "amongst the Dutch it was unfashionable not to be a man of business[6]." And yet, in spite of this, there was none of that ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... whose last chance had been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those worst off went out game—no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of those broken on the wheel ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... in good taste to make an ostentatious display of the gifts, and if they are exhibited, the cards of the donors should be removed, and ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... curiosity that, far from being mean or ignoble, seemed to lift her not only above the ordinary weaknesses of her own sex, but made her superior to the men around her. Almost before she knew it, the operation was over, and she regarded with equal curiosity the ostentatious solicitude with which the doctor seemed to be wiping his fateful instrument that bore an odd resemblance to a silver-handled centre-bit. The stertorous breathing below the bandages had given way ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... The ostentatious licence and the unscrupulous conduct of the Alcibiades of the 17th century have been deservedly censured. But even his critics agree that he was good-humoured, good-natured, generous, an unsurpassed mimic and the leader of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... part of the charm. The hands of big Boone lowered; the others assumed more natural positions, but each, it seemed to Pierre, took particular and almost ostentatious care that their right hands should be always far from ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Khiva under similar pretexts, will at the moment of her own selection assuredly break through her boundaries in Asia Minor. The position of England will be contemptible. We have thrown down the gauntlet to Russia by an ostentatious alliance with Turkey, but we hesitate to insist upon the overwhelming necessity of British official and military officers to organise the civil administration and an army of defence; thus, when the sudden emergency shall arise, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... discontent, and physical hardships prevailing among large sections of the population which had provided most of the holocausts for the Moloch of War, the ostentatious gaiety of the prosperous few might well seem a challenge. And so it was construed by the sullen lack-alls who prowled about the streets of Paris and told one another that their ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his abilities were ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... frequency of Lyly's classical allusions. If the only definition of pedantry be 'vain and ostentatious display of learning,' I question if we may dismiss Lyly's wealth of classical lore with the word 'pedantry.' He was fresh from his university life. If he studied at all when he was at Oxford, he must have studied Latin and Greek, for after these literatures little else was studied. Young ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... experiences of religion, with the air of one who expects the congratulations of his audience. The humility which thinks only of the acquisition itself, as the very perfection of human conquest, was wanting equally to his language and deportment. The very details which he gave, were ostentatious; and the gracious smiles which covered his lips as he concluded, were those of the self-complacent person, who feels that he has just been saying those good things, which, of necessity, must command the applause of ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... on the other hand, must have been braggers born. Never was such boasting! Such ostentatious display of practice! It was a wonder they did not challenge all England. Yet we firmly resolved not to decline the combat; and one of the most spirited of the new growth, William Grey by name, and a farmer's son by station, took up the glove in a style of manly courtesy that would have done ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... without requiring to be told, that they were ringing for Diana's marriage with the Colonel. That showed there wasn't much the matter with me, didn't it? Why, I can hear them everywhere now. I don't think she ought to have had them rung at Sandown though: it was just a little ostentatious, so long after the ceremony; don't ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... salle a manger, where a very numerous company were assembled—twenty-five or thirty in all. They were, apparently, people of rank-certainly of high breeding—although their habiliments, I thought, were extravagantly rich, partaking somewhat too much of the ostentatious finery of the vielle cour. I noticed that at least two-thirds of these guests were ladies; and some of the latter were by no means accoutred in what a Parisian would consider good taste at the present day. Many females, for example, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... another person was ushered into the same pew with him. The stranger pulled out of his pocket a prayer-book, and offered to share it with the Cantab, though he perceived he had one in his hand. This courtesy proceeded from a mere ostentatious display of his learning, as it proved to be in Latin. The Cantab immediately declined the offer by saying, "Sir, I read nothing ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... disaster. Facing the square of the Carrousel, between the arch and the Louvre, is the much vaster monument of Gambetta in marble and bronze, with long extracts from his orations in the evil days of '71 engraved on the tall shaft which rises behind him,—a most ostentatious commemoration of defeat. Farther west, the great Place de la Concorde is surrounded by handsome pavilions and balustrades, with eight stately, seated female figures of heroic size typifying the principal cities of France. To one of these the traveller's attention is at once directed by the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... was in mistaking nominal for real profits. Calculating their dividend on the nominal profits, and never supposing that there could be any such things as losses in commercial speculation, or bad debts from misfortunes and bad faith, they squandered them in lavish hospitality and ostentatious display, or allowed their retiring members to take them to England and to every other part of the world where their creditors might not find them, till they discovered that all the real capital left at their command was hardly sufficient to pay back with the stipulated interest one-tenth ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... anything but her tea-making; she moved the cups this way and that, filled the pot with water, blew out and lighted again the flame of the spirit-lamp, without paying the least heed to Maurice, making, indeed, such an ostentatious show of being occupied, that it would have needed a brave man to break in upon her duties with idle words. He remained standing, however, in a constrained silence, which lasted until she could not invent anything else to do, and was obliged to drink her own tea. Then he said ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson |
