"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she be able to do such a thing, that it was but a meaningless dream that had come into her head, but the dream was sweet. She did not, however, want to talk to John May. At the moment she was in a girlish period of being disgusted at what she thought of as the vulgarity of the men who worked on the place. At the table they ate noisily and greedily like hungry animals. She wanted youth that was like her own youth, crude and uncertain perhaps, but reaching eagerly out into the unknown. She wanted to draw very near to something ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... more attractive than beautiful. There was that about her whole demeanour which is expressively termed coquetry, not the coquetry of action, but of feeling: her eyes were dark and brilliant, her mouth full and pouting; and the nose was only saved from vulgarity by that turn, to describe which we are compelled to use a foreign term—it was un peu retrousse: her complexion was of a clear olive, through which the blood glowed warmly whenever called to her cheek by any particular emotion. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his own tradition, as we have shown, was received from the Arthurian source. His chivalry gave his satire a very delicate edge. It was infinitely more cutting in showing the misfit of vulgarity with beauty ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... This talkative person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly joined him in deploring. Mr. Ledbetter, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... look at home, and see if, in the days when the Waverleys constituted almost all our lighter reading, the tone of society was not higher, the spirit more heroic, the current of thought and expression purer, than in these realistic days, when we turn for amusement to descriptions of every quaint vulgarity that makes up the life of the boarding-house ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... and empty head—versus no purse, and old nobility. They had the satisfaction of ruining each other—the full purse was emptied by devouring duns, and the old nobility suffered by its connexion with vulgarity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... saw even now?... And, all things considered, I do carry on the farce of life wonderfully well,"—all this passage, with the silence of the man, is on the highest level of poetic invention, and Clara ranks with Ophelia. To her strain of madness we may ascribe, perhaps, what Sydney Smith calls the vulgarity of her lighter moments. But here the genius of Shakspeare is faultless, where Scott's is most faulty ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... plainly in burr, because that word's definition is 'a rough sounding of the letter R.' This is not represented by the pronunciation b[schwa]:. What that 'southern English' pronunciation does indicate is the vulgarity and inconvenience of its degradations. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... had acquired the vigor and agility to handle the javelin with consummate address. Contrasted as are his earlier and later styles, they have some essential qualities in common;—an exquisite fitness of expression; a total exemption from harshness, vulgarity, and all the vices that have grown so common; a method, a sequence, which is at once the closest and the least obtrusive to be found in any prose of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of my efforts to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the claret ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... representative of the democratic principle who had contrived to push himself forward to popularity by whatever means, and who represented the average instead of the highest culture of the community, thus establishing an aristocracy of mediocrity, nay, even of vulgarity, in some less intelligent constituencies. The one great strength of democracy is, that it opens all the highways of power and station to the better man, that it gives every man the chance of rising to his natural level; and its great ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... built a very splash affair, and to set an example to the state in their own establishment of economy and reform in the public departments, hired Soyer, the best cook of the age, at a salary that would have pensioned half-a-dozen of the poor worn-out clerks in Downing Street. Vulgarity is always showy. It is a pretty word, "Reformers." The common herd of them I don't mind much, for rogues and fools always find employment for each other. But when I hear of a great reformer like some of the big bugs to England, that have been grinning through ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... to take a rather low order of amusement 'Robinson Crusoe' will always be one of the most charming of books. We have the romantic and adventurous incidents upon which the most unflinching realism can be set to work without danger of vulgarity. Here is precisely the story suited to De Foe's strength and weakness. He is forced to be artistic in spite of himself. He cannot lose the thread of the narrative and break it into disjointed fragments, for the limits of the island confine him as well as ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... impudent of created liars,' and a belief in Free Trade was the mark of a dangerous radical. To the Eton time my brother also refers a passionate contempt for the 'sentimental and comic' writers then popular. He was disgusted not only by their sentimentalism but by their vulgarity and their ridicule ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... accustomed to this cast of mind that, when it had tickled neither his sense of humour nor his vanity, he had been indifferent to it. To-night he knew it was vulgar; but he had no contempt for it, because it was his mother who was betraying vulgarity. He felt sorry that she should be like that—that all the men and women with whom she was associated were like that. He felt sorry for Mabel, because she enjoyed it, and consequently more tenderhearted towards her than ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... here recommended is, as far as is possible, a selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we have? Whence is it to come? And where ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the ice-pail a little more into the shade. Now, while they set the luncheon, we will walk in that little flower garden, and I will tell you, if you like, a story of mine I once wrote, the story of two roses. I published it, alas! It is so hard to save even our most beautiful thoughts from the vulgarity of print, in these days where everything—love and wine, and even the roses themselves—cost ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... think," while Humour, to quote Carlyle again, "is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind." Through this truth we may see how Punch has so continually dealt with vulgarity without being vulgar; while many of his so-called rivals, touching the self-same subjects, have so tainted themselves as to render them fitter for the kitchen than the drawing-room, through lack of this saving grace. Fun may ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... de Retz shut the window with a shrug of protest against the vulgarity of prejudice. He did not notice four men in the garb of pilgrims who stood in the dark of ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... the world; it has made thousands of saints and thousands of heroes; it has revolutionized innumerable individual lives. It has changed people from selfishness to unselfishness; from cowardice to courage; from despair to hope; from vulgarity to decency; from barrenness of life to fruitfulness. When religion can change the lives of millions, when it can produce supreme creations in art, it is a force ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... government gave every facility to those who advocated popular principles with the aim of feathering their own nests. Under the influence of the social craze all that tended to promote external beauty of architecture or equipment was discountenanced, and a sodden rule of ignorant craft and vulgarity was settled upon the nation. Those at the helm were clever demagogues who were prepared to humor the people, provided they had the control of the public funds wherewith to indulge their licentious tastes. ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... he recommenced operations), "I highly disapprove of the absurd practice, so common with young men of the present day, of expressing their ideas in that low and incomprehensible dialect, termed 'slang,' which, in my opinion, has neither wit nor refinement to redeem its vulgarity, and which effectually prevents their acquiring that easy yet dignified mode of expression which should characterise the conversation of the true gentleman. In my younger days we took Burke for our model; the eloquence ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... submit to the same power. The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... was going rather too far, even to the borders of vulgarity; but Mills remained untroubled and only ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... turned out so fortunately. I love you for your courage in standing by her, but there are many things you will learn—beliefs and usages of society. I don't mean simply money. We Crawfords have no vulgarity with a gold veneer; and, my dear girl, you may tell all your life with Mrs. Boyd over to mother, indeed, I think she will want to know it all; but—be ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... just what jealousy means. I am not vexed with you, but I was miserable, and you will forgive me for escaping from my misery. Two days more, and I should have made an exhibition of myself; yes, there would have been an outbreak of vulgarity. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Colston should be received by a charwoman with a pail, should be shown into the room downstairs, and find it like a public-house bar! If Mr. Furze had been there alone it would not so much have mattered, but the presence of wife and daughter sanctioned the vulgarity, not to say indecency. Mrs. Colston would naturally conclude they were accustomed to that sort of thing—that the pipe, Mrs. Bellamy and the sausages, the absence of Mr. Furze's coat and waistcoat, were the "atmosphere," as Mrs. Furze put it, in ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... dwelling in a world of symbols—a world many times removed from that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurative witness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and ugliness and vulgarity exist only in the ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... to be in high repute, one must feign an ignorance of every kind of employment. To be a good housewife, to understand every domestic duty, is degrading in the extreme. It is thought a proof of vulgarity to be acquainted with ordinary things. Pride is taken in egregious mistakes as to certain persons, places, and pursuits. To show a knowledge of what is done beyond her own caste would be to forfeit her rank, and would expel her from the highest circles ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... "An ebullition of the natural lout beneath the cassock" it has been called by Mr. Chambers, and many of its usages may be explained by the reaction of coarse natures freed for once from restraint. It brought to light, however, not merely personal vulgarity, but a whole range of traditional customs, derived probably from a fusion of the Roman feast of the Kalends of January with Teutonic or ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... rank, and boasts of poverty. The law, to which Edinburgh has always been so largely indebted, sent its copious supplies; who, instead of disturbing good company by professional matter—an offence with which the lawyers of every place are charged—were remarkably free of this vulgarity; and being trained to take difference of opinion easily, and to conduct discussions with forbearance, were, without undue obtrusion, the most cheerful people that were to be met with. Lords Monboddo, Hailes, Glenlee, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... regular. He was obliged to have menial assistance. While he might have eaten his bread "in sorrow" carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for him, the occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity and materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness that he could not eat the meal he had himself prepared. He did not yet wish to die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the only alternative, he chose the latter. An Indian woman, so hideous as to scarcely suggest ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... said these words young Mr. Rowe, who believed himself to be connected with society, and who dealt largely in pictures, without, however, descending to the vulgarity of shop-keeping (he would resent being called a picture-dealer), approached and insisted on Sir Owen listening to the story of his difficulties with some county councillors who could not find the money ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... CASTILLO, regidor of the loyal city of Guatemala, while composing this most true history of the conquest of Mexico, happened to see a work by Francisco Lopez de Gomara on the same subject, the elegance of which made me ashamed of the vulgarity of my own, and caused me to throw away my pen in despair. After having read it, however, I found it full of misrepresentations of the events, having exaggerated the number of natives which we killed in the different battles, in a manner ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... much to the court; the natural and national range of poesy is higher and more extensive than that; the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc had higher claims. But it is something to have delivered poesy from coarse vulgarity, and introduced refinement into it. Clement Marot rendered to the French language, then in labor of progression, and, one might say, of formation, eminent service: he gave it a naturalness, a clearness, an easy swing, and, for the most part, a correctness which it had hitherto lacked. It ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... trimmed the same shape as the finger tips, and left neither too long nor too short. There's a happy medium that is easily discovered, because of its usefulness, its convenience, and its artistic beauty. A too-highly polished surface is also a vulgarity invented by the old-time manicure. A little powder rubbed briskly on the nail with a heavily padded polisher is a great improvement, but when the nails shine with door-knob brilliancy it's high time to call a halt. As for jagged, uneven ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... taken to the Zoo. Cycle for "bicycle" is quite dignified and proper, though bike is certainly vulgar. In the hurry of life to-day people more frequently phone than "telephone" to each other, and we can send a wire instead of a "telegram" without any risk of vulgarity. The word cab replaced the more magnificent "cabriolet," and then with the progress of invention we got the "taxicab." It is now the turn of cab to be dropped, and when we are in haste we hail a taxi. No ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... is! It has such a decent sound, almost respectable. We are a refined people, even in our sins, and I know no word in the English language we strive harder to avoid using in any of its forms than that word of brutal vulgarity, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... prepares to fall on the last dreary finale of Chopin's life, a life not for a moment heroic, yet lived according to his lights and free from the sordid and the soil of vulgarity. Jules Janin said: "He lived ten miraculous years with a breath ready to fly away," and we know that his servant Daniel had always to carry him to bed. For ten years he had suffered from so much illness that a relapse was not noticed by ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... however, Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's influence was perceptibly upon the wane. Even Colonel Colquhoun wearied of her—to Evadne's great regret. For Mrs. Guthrie Brimston's vulgarity and coarseness of mind were always balanced by her undoubted propriety of conduct, and her faults were altogether preferable to the exceeding polish and refinement which covered the absolutely corrupt ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... temporary edifice with its complete stage apparatus. It required all the love of his friends, especially of that rarest of all friends, to dispel at times his deep anger when he was compelled to see how mediocrity, even actual vulgarity, again and again held captive the minds of his people to whom he had such high and noble things to offer. "In the end I must accept the money of the Jews in order to build a theatre for the Germans," he said, in the spring of 1873, to Liszt, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... turned white, and moved away. I threw my book at her; it hit her head, and her comb was broken by my geological systems. There was a stir; Miss Black hurried from her desk, saying, "Young ladies, what does this mean? Miss C. Morgeson, your temper equals your vulgarity, I find. Take your ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Captain. He had fought at Copenhagen and Trafalgar, and distinguished himself in many a severe contest on the main during those stirring times, and bore the reputation of a dashing naval officer. At the advanced age of eighty, he retained all his original ignorance and vulgarity; and was never admitted into the society which his rank in the service entitled ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... destined to live in a wilderness, would be conclusive. An anchorite may attain a very high degree of sanctity and yet retain all his defects of character—his crudity, selfishness, vulgarity. While grace disposes towards gentleness it does not destroy nature. There is no essential connection between holiness and ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... confess. I swear it is enough at times to make you swear You would almost rather be anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... not prepared to discard at the first requisition of her dearer self. Her hate of me was so extreme as to render her blind to everything besides—her daughter's sickness, the counsel of the physician, the otherwise obvious vulgarity and meanness of Perkins, and that gross injustice which I had suffered at her hands from the beginning, and which, to many minds, might have amply justified in me the hostile feelings which she laid to my charge. In this blindness she precipitated events, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... beautiful woman is, what a manly man,—when I reel, dazzled by this glare, drunken with these perfumes, confused by this alluring music, and reflect upon the enormous sums wasted in a pompous profusion that delights no one,—when I look around upon all this rampant vulgarity in tinsel and Brussels lace, and think how fortunes go, how men struggle and lose the bloom of their honesty, how women hide in a smiling pretence, and eye with caustic glances their neighbor's newer house, diamonds, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... thankfulness. Class distinction can hardly be said to exist; there are employers and employed, masters and servants, of course, but the line of demarcation is lightly drawn, and we find an easy familiarity wholly free from impoliteness, much less vulgarity, ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... with a critical eye, and was much pleased to note that Molly had shown good taste in their selection. They were all ladylike girls, evidently from good, well-guarded homes, and, though merry and care- free, had not a touch of vulgarity. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and 'roost' was one of these phrases. In a flash he fell from a creature engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... 'assofeta', that is to say, her chief 'femme de chambre'; an office more considerable in Spain than with us. Laura had brought her husband with her, a peasant in every way, seen and known by nobody; but Laura had intelligence, shrewdness, cleverness, and ambitious views, in spite of the external vulgarity of her manners, which she had preserved either from habit, or from policy, for make herself less suspected. Like all persons of this extraction, she was thoroughly selfish. She was not unaware how impatiently Alberoni endured her presence, and feared her ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Bois-fort,—a charming little resort in the forest whose intense cockneyism became perfectly inoffensive as being in a foreign land, and remote from the invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention all these things to show the adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gayety by which I was, as it were, "accompanied," when I next ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and more convinced of the service they might render. Manners are, in truth, of great importance. If real refinement be a merit, it is surely desirable that it should show itself in the general deportment. Real vulgarity is the expression of something mean or coarse in sentiments or habits. It betrays the want of fine moral perceptions. The peculiarities in manner and deportment, which proceed from the selfishness of the great world, when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... shoulders, and a slim waist. Tall and slender was she in stature, with a face like the egg of a goose. Her eyes so beautiful, with their well-curved eyebrows, possessed in their gaze a bewitching flash. At the very sight of her refined and elegant manners all idea of vulgarity was forgotten. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... plaintiff, and the gifted defendant. Good heavens, gentlemen! and is my humble client's misfortune to become his fault? If he be obscure and ignorant, unacquainted with the usages of society, deprived of the blessings of a superior education—if he have contracted vulgarity, whose fault is it?—Who has occasioned it? Who plunged him and his parents before him into an unjust poverty and obscurity, from which Providence is about this day to rescue him, and put him in possession of his own? Gentlemen, if topics like ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... mission to atone for her husband's sins, and she fulfilled her duty; more could not be asked of her, for his sins were many. The daughter was a copy of the father, in crinoline; taking to affectation—which is vulgarity in its most offensive form—as a duck takes to water. Even her dress was marked, not by that neatness which shows refinement, but by precision, which in dress is vulgar. One glance, and you saw the woman who in another age would have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... but is rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates. Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that he will get a beating from his mistress, Aspasia: this is the natural exaggeration of what might be expected from an imperious woman. Socrates is not to be taken seriously in all that he says, and Plato, ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... aversion, I will lock her up, and keep her upon bread and water, till she knows, that she ought to have neither, before her own father has told her what is what." Mr. Moreland, all of whose nerves were irritated into a fever by so much vulgarity, and such brutal insensibility, could retain his seat no longer. He started up, and regarding his entertainer with a look of ineffable indignation, flung the door in his face, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the PEOPLE lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have schrecklich viel gelesen, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... rendered to Society by the joker. But now that people saw with open eyes through the transparent mechanism of exchange, they were extremely loth to part with their tangible commodities in return for mere flashes of wit or vulgarity. Previously they had only half realised that they were soberly and seriously making coats, or working machines, or smelting iron, while these jesters were merely cudgelling their brains or consulting back files. The complexity of the thing had disguised the facts. But now that they saw exactly ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the emphasis which nature had given to his features, he was a presentable person. Flying side-whiskers made his mouth appear grotesquely wide, and the play of strong feelings had produced vicious wrinkles on his spare face. He appeared to be a man of energy, vivacity and vulgarity, reminding one of a dinner of pork and cabbage. He was soon forgotten in the excitement of a delightful day, whose glories came to a brilliant end in that banquet which introduced the nephew of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Illingworth's speech in A Woman of No Importance: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these—or the immortal "Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"—we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to an antiquated conception ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... hard-working persons—the latter are Chinamen. The 'tony' society of Bowen is about as lively and intelligent as that of a decaying Cathedral town in the old country. The atmosphere of matchless snobbery and vulgarity that pervades Bowen can be perceived by the passing voyager ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... not to give offence to you, and also to bear silently whatever conceit and insults may escape you. Perhaps we may become friends. But we cannot remain as we are. The blow you struck the other day must be answered for. I ask satisfaction, and the incompleteness and vulgarity of a pugilistic encounter will not suit me. I propose, therefore, as we cannot resort to the regular duel of pistols, (for reasons so good and evident that I need not name them), that after the example of the ancients, whose history we are now daily reading, we have ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... replenishing before luncheon. She was putting on her bonnet to go to order them, when a doubt seized her whether she was transgressing the dignities of the Honourable Mrs. Martindale. Matilda had lectured against vulgarity when Arthur had warned her against ultra-gentility, and she wavered, till finding there was no one to send, her good sense settled the question. She walked along, feeling the cares and troubles of life arising on her, and thinking she should never again be gay and ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impossible to remain in Skeaton during the summer months. Oh! the trippers! ...Oh! the trippers! Yes, they were terrible-swallowed up the sands, eggshells, niggers, pierrots, bathing-machines, vulgarity, moonlight embracing, noise, sand, and dust. If you were any one at all you did not stay in Skeaton during the summer months-unless, as I have said, you were so grand that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... concerning sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes, the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of the satyr's vulgarity. All these poses, of course, have supplied not an iota to an understanding of the foundations of the problems of sex, biologically considered. Thus, a masculine master has coined that immortal phrase, the Eternal Feminine. And in a matriarchate we should undoubtedly hear of the Eternal Masculine. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... care for the play," Ellison said eagerly. "You are of the old world, and Isteinism to you will simply spell chaos and vulgarity. But the woman! well, you will see her! I don't want to prejudice you by praises which you would certainly think extravagant! I ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for saints in authority Things are; and we have just to take them Too long immune from criticism Too-consciousness that Time was after her Trust our reason and our senses for what they're worth Unself-consciousness Voices had a hard, half-jovial vulgarity Wake at night and hear the howling of all the packs of the world We can only find out for ourselves We can only help ourselves; and I can only bear it if I rebel We can't take things at second-hand any longer We do think we ought ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... essentially Venetian as is the work of these two painters, it does not reach the highest level. It falls short of grandeur, and has that worldly tone that borders on vulgarity. As we study it we feel that it marks the point to which Venetian art might have attained, the flood-mark it might have touched, if it had lacked the advent of the three or four great spirits, who, appearing about the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... stirred me to passion, had from sitting so long with her head bent c ome loose from the comb and was untidy, but, to my eyes, that only made it look more rich and luxuriant. All this, though is banal to the point of vulgarity. Before me stood an ordinary woman, perhaps neither beautiful nor elegant, but this was my wife with whom I had once lived, and with whom I should have been living to this day if it had not been for her unfortunate character; she was the one human being on the terrestrial ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... eye fell upon it Payson was conscious of its coarse vulgarity. And "Weng"! Whoever heard of such a name? He certainly had not,—hadn't even known that his father had a partner with such an absurd cognomen! "—& Weng!" There was something terribly plebeian about it. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... and, in that repetition of her taunt about "furnishing" supplies for the wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire success, concealed—namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it would last through most occasions, and it would deceive ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the the curse of man if he fails to use it rightly. Like Job, Dante insists that life is a warfare. Victory is possible only by the right exercise of the will enlightened by God. Defeat is sure if the will embraces sin. To Dante sin is not a mere vulgarity or the violation of a social convention or "a soft infirmity of the blood." "Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind," says James Russell Lowell, "would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error." To Dante ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... unmistakable appreciation and admiration on her relative. A pang shot through Clarence's breast. He had never seen her look in that way at Mrs. Peyton. Yet here was this stranger, provincial, overdressed, and extravagant, whose vulgarity was only made tolerable through her good humor, who had awakened that interest which the refined Mrs. Peyton had never yet been able to touch. As Mrs. McClosky swept out of the room with Susy he turned away with ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... middle-aged, to entertain any such evil designs, avowing freely that she likes him, and treating him very nearly as she does papa. It is my business to keep 'our aunt,' who, between ourselves, has, below the surface, the vulgarity of nature that high-breeding cannot eradicate, from startling the little humming-bird, before the net has been properly twined round her bright little heart. As far as I can see, he is much smitten, but very cautious in his approaches, and he ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... card. He returned joyously to his hotel, where, as Mr. Green was lying in wait, he had to part with most of his advance. And Nick tramped home torn in mind, fearing instinctively that he was about to jump from the frying-pan of ignorance into a fire of vulgarity at which ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... could not have taken my hand with a more frigid demeanour. Miss Robinson, though not more than twenty years of age, was Gothic in her appearance and stiff in her deportment; she was of low stature and clumsy, with a countenance peculiarly formed for the expression of sarcastic vulgarity—a short snub nose, turned up at the point, a head thrown back with an air of hauteur; a gaudy-coloured chintz gown, a thrice-bordered cap, with a profusion of ribbons, and a countenance somewhat more ruddy than was consistent with ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... signs, painted in gigantic size, on the outside of shops. These are grotesque representations of the business carried on within. It would seem as though the object was to ridicule the proprietor's occupation by the vulgarity of these signs. Be this as it may, the inevitable half dozen pulque drinkers lean upon the counter all the while, absorbing the liquid which brings insensibility. As they drop off one by one, their places are taken by others, who are promptly supplied by the plethoric bar-tender. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... fashionable, and there was no harm in her—no one had ever said anything against her. Besides, she was one of the few relations still left to the Saracinesca. The daughter of a cousin of the Prince, she would make a good wife for Giovanni, and would bring sunshine into the house. There was a tinge of vulgarity in her manner; but, like many elderly men of his type, Saracinesca pardoned her this fault in consideration of her noisy good spirits and general good-nature. He was very much annoyed at hearing that his son had offended her so grossly by his forgetfulness; especially it was unfortunate ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... which, to be sure, was awfully long, and as grave as a sermon, some of the courtiers tittered, some yawned, and some affected to be asleep and snore outright. But Roger de Backbite thinking to curry favor with the King by this piece of vulgarity, his Majesty fetched him a knock on the nose and a buffet on the ear, which, I warrant me, wakened Master Roger; to whom the King said, "Listen and be civil, slave; Wilfrid is singing about thee.—Wilfrid, thy ballad is long, but it is to the purpose, and I have grown cool during ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him that she ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... man I have loved or ever shall love. Further, let me tell you I am twenty-eight; I have always been poor—I hate poverty, and it has soured me no less than you. Dress is the thing in life I care for most, vulgarity my chief abomination. And to be frank, I consider you the most vulgar person I have ever met. Will you still ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... moment they were at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London. The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in this crowd, and Lucas ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... knowledge of the number of dollars which dangled from the shoulders of the fashionable butterfly. This boastful parade of information as to how much one expends in this or that article implies an undertone of vulgarity peculiar to those who have nothing but money to be proud of. The cultivated and truly genteel mind is never guilty of it. Yet it somehow prevails too extensively among American women. Display is a sort of mania with too many of them. A family ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... said, "I haven't had anybody speak to me like that for four years." Her voice betrayed excitement, and differed in tone, and she had cast off unconsciously the vulgarity of speech. At that moment she seemed reminiscent of what she must once have been; and he found himself going ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... before he was breeched. Mr. Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the human heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also "gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct. 1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. Instead of our 'one thing needful' justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence—our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser's, vowed away from coarseness and vulgarity: he's the most perfect intellectual companion in the world. He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire even such applause as theirs.... Of course, that was ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... pleased to consider select society in their own sets, and they consequently cannot have a dance without guinea tickets nor a pic-nic without dozens of champagne. This shows their native ignorance and vulgarity more than enough; genteel people go upon a plan directly contrary, not merely enjoying themselves, but enjoying themselves without extravagance or waste: in this respect the gentility-mongers would do well to imitate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... even thrones; while the "purse-proud, elbowing insolence" of our Northern monopolist would soon disappear forever under the smooth speech of the pedlar, scourging our frontiers for a livelihood, or the bluff vulgarity of the South Sea whaler, following the harpoon amid storms and shoals. Doubtless the abolitionists think we could grow cotton without slaves, or that at worst the reduction of the crop would be moderate and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... crossed the threshold of the place whence came all the money she had to spend. When she did, she entered it with such airs as she imagined to represent the consciousness of the scion of a county family: there is one show of breeding vulgarity seldom assumes—simplicity. No sign of recognition would pass between her husband and herself: by one stern refusal to acknowledge his advances, she had from the first taught him that in the shop they were strangers: he saw the rock of ridicule ahead, and required no second lesson: when ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... girls learn that modesty and shrinking from public gaze are the invariable marks of true beauty in womanhood; and that anything which is contrary to these is a mark of vulgarity and ill-breeding? Guard your name as the jewel of your life. Many a young woman with pure life has lived under shadows all her later years, because of some careless—only careless, not wrong—act in youth which had the appearance ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable, whether by her imprudence, vulgarity or jealousy—whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character or ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostentation of their wives and children, who "devote themselves," it may be, "to expense regardless of pleasure"; but we ought not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The masters of ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... has outlived a good many necessities. They tell me over here that my increase of weight is extremely marked, and though they don't tell me that I am coarse, I am sure they think me so. There is very little coarseness here—not quite enough, I think—though there is plenty of vulgarity, which is a very different thing. On the whole, the country is becoming much more agreeable. It isn't that the people are charming, for that they always were (the best of them, I mean, for it isn't true of the others), but that places and things as well have acquired the art ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... it with perfect composure. Her fine eyes blazed, but otherwise her face might have been a waxen mask. With her, in this scene, was all the tragic dignity; with him, the weakness and vulgarity. ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... any vulgarity, and do not think Mr. Iglesias would countenance anything of that kind in the presence of a lady. He would ascertain beforehand the nature of the piece to which he invited any ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... becoming my station could not, of course, be purchased without credit and money: to procure which, as our patrimony had been wasted by our ancestors, and we were above the vulgarity and slow returns and doubtful chances of trade, my uncle kept a faro-bank. We were in partnership with a Florentine, well known in all the Courts of Europe, the Count Alessandro Pippi, as skilful a player as ever was seen; ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... red streaks—as though the rich blood throbbed too painfully in the veins—which are the first signs of the decay of "fine" women. With middle age and the fullness of figure to which most women of her temperament are prone, had come also that indescribable vulgarity of speech and manner which habitual absence of moral restraint never ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... and fog and mud and east wind; out of vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner and Ruskin. ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... threatens the solidarity of society. The dwelling-house is costly and the furnishings are expensive. A retinue of servants performs many useless functions in the operation of the establishment. Ostentation often carried to the point of vulgarity marks habits of speech, of dress, and of conduct both within and outside of the home. Every member of the family has his own friends and interests and usually his own share of the family allowance. The adults of the family are unreasonably ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe |
